Derek Stiles

• PhD
• Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Objectives: Limited evidence exists for the use of rerouting devices in children with severe-to-profound unilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Many laboratory studies to date have evaluated hearing-in-noise performance in specific target-masker spatial configurations within a small group of participants and with only a subset of available hearing...

Objectives/Hypothesis In children with mild to moderately severe unilateral hearing loss (UHL), assess whether subject‐reported quality of life (QOL) and teacher‐ and parent‐reported perception of listening difficulty are affected by use of a hearing aid (HA) with baseline accommodations, compared to children receiving only baseline accommodations....

Objectives/Hypothesis Childhood hearing loss impacts linguistic, academic, social, and psychologic development, and may have lasting implications for future workforce performance. Current evidence for obesity as a pediatric sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) risk factor is intriguing but equivocal. We hypothesized that obesity is associated with a h...

Purpose Because of uncertainty about the level of hearing where hearing aids should be provided to children, the goal of the current study was to develop audibility-based hearing aid candidacy criteria based on the relationship between unaided hearing and language outcomes in a group of children with hearing loss who did not wear hearing aids. Met...

The use of "big data" for pediatric hearing research requires new approaches to both data collection and research methods. The widespread deployment of electronic health record systems creates new opportunities and corresponding challenges in the secondary use of large volumes of audiological and medical data. Opportunities include cost-effective h...

The speech intelligibility index (SII) was developed to predict the intelligibility of the speech signal by weighting the importance of different frequency regions of audibility for a given speech test. To obtain the SII, the frequency spectrum between 100 and 9500 Hertz (Hz) is divided into speech bands, either by octaves, 1/3 octaves, or critical...

Objective(s) The objective was to describe the characteristics of hearing losses documented in patients treated with clarithromycin alone for nontuberculous mycobacterial NTM lymphadenitis in a pediatric tertiary care center over a 12-year period. Methods An institutional review board (IRB) approval was obtained. A database search was performed us...

Objectives To examine if the tablet-based Agilis Health Mobile Audiogram (Agilis Audiogram) is an effective and valid measure of hearing thresholds compared to a pure-tone audiogram in an adult and pediatric population. Methods Participants underwent an otologic exam, conventional audiometric evaluation and the self-administered Agilis Audiogram....

Objective: To determine if discussing cochlear implantation (CI) with patients with enlarged vestibular aqueducts (EVA) and their families before reaching audiological criteria for CI candidacy effects the length of time between reaching audiological candidacy and CI surgery, and to describe the universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) results a...

Purpose: About 7% of children between 6 and 17 years of age suffer from non-organic hearing loss (NOHL), yet little is known about how audiologists diagnose and manage this population. Audiologist appraisal of various approaches of evaluating children with NOHL was surveyed in order to determine which approaches are used most frequently and are per...

Previous research has indicated that processing of pitch changes is related to speech perception. Current work investigated the relationship of pitch-pattern training to speech perception in young normal-hearing adults. The training protocol was based on an interactive pattern-reconstruction task in which listeners assembled four or five tones (fre...

Purpose To determine whether word learning problems associated with developmental language impairment (LI) reflect deficits in encoding or subsequent remembering of forms and meanings. Method Sixty-nine 18- to 25-year-olds with LI or without (the normal development [ND] group) took tests to measure learning of 16 word forms and meanings immediatel...

In my quest to become a better professor, I have been searching for the instructional paradigms that best facilitate the educational process between me and my students. To support this endeavor, I opted to study learning diversity. The results of my investigation led me to reflect upon whether my teaching strategies inadvertently engaged only a sub...

Background: Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle to understand familiar words and learn unfamiliar words. We explored the extent to which these problems reflect deficient use of probabilistic gaze in the extra-linguistic context. Method: Thirty children with ASD and 43 with typical development (TD) participated in a spoken...

The more a novel word conforms to the phonotactics of the language, the more wordlike it is and the easier it is to learn. It is unknown to what extent children with hearing loss (CHL) take advantage of phonotactic cues to support word learning. This study investigated whether CHL had similar sensitivities to wordlikeness during a word-learning tas...

Welcome back to an ongoing feature article that challenges the audiologist to identify a diagnosis for a case study based on a listing and explanation of the nonaudiology and audiology test battery. It is important to recognize that a hearing loss or a vestibular issue may be a manifestation of a systemic illness. Being part of the diagnostic and t...

Learning to accurately identify sarcasm demonstrates theory of mind and is an important step in mastering adult discourse. We investigated whether a published method of assessing sarcasm could be applied to children with hearing loss. Adults and children typically use two linguistic cues differentially to identify sarcasm: context and intonation. W...

Past work has shown involvement of context in the perception of sequences of meaningful speech sounds. The present study extended investigation to meaningful environmental sounds, evaluating the accuracy in identifying individual sources in sequences of five environmental sounds that were either likely or not to have occurred together in place and...

Purpose To determine whether a clinically obtainable measure of audibility, the aided Speech Intelligibility Index (SII; American National Standards Institute, 2007), is more sensitive than the pure-tone average (PTA) at predicting the lexical abilities of children who wear hearing aids (CHA). Method School-age CHA and age-matched children with no...

Purpose To determine whether children with mild-to-moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss (CHL) present with disturbances in working memory and whether these disturbances relate to the size of their receptive vocabularies. Method Children 6 to 9 years of age participated. Aspects of working memory were tapped by articulation rate, forward an...

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The purpose of this study was to determine the role of frequency selectivity and sequential stream segregation in the perception of simultaneous sentences by listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. Simultaneous sentence perception was tested in listeners with normal hearing and with sensorineural hearing loss using sentence pairs consisting of o...

As a group, children with hearing loss show slower language development than their peers with normal hearing. Age of intervention has a profound impact on language outcomes but data examining the correlation between degree of hearing loss and language outcomes are variable. Two approaches are used in the current study to examine this variability. I...