Mridula Sharma

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Verified

Mridula verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor at Flinders University

Purpose The aim of this study was to examine attention, memory, and auditory processing in children with reported listening difficulty in noise (LDN) despite having clinically normal hearing. Method Twenty-one children with LDN and 15 children with no listening concerns (controls) participated. The clinically normed auditory processing tests inclu...

Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing skills in children and adults. However, there is limited data available on the maturational effects on the performance on these tests. Purpose: The current study investigated maturational effects on auditory processing abilities using three psychophys...

This study compares cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) at different interstimulus intervals (ISIs) in infants to determine the impact of stimulus rate on wave morphology. Infant CAEPs are dominated by a positive peak P1. We hypothesized that infant CAEPs would be more adult-like at longer ISI with P1, followed by negativity (labelled N450)...

Background Unaddressed age-related hearing loss is highly prevalent among older adults, typified by negative consequences for speech-in-noise perception and psychosocial wellbeing. There is promising evidence that group singing may enhance speech-in-noise perception and psychosocial wellbeing. However, there is a lack of robust evidence, primarily...

Background and Objective Detection rates of hypertension continues to be suboptimal worldwide. The risk of hypertension increases substantially in older adults aged ≥65 years, a group also at increased risk of atrial fibrillation (AF), cognitive decline and hearing loss—all factors associated with hypertension. This pilot study aimed to 1) implemen...

Objective: A review was conducted to investigate the current evidence for effects of otitis media (OM) on phonological awareness and reading skills in children under 12 years old. Design: A review conducted in 2024 to identify articles between 1978 and 2024 related to OM and its impact on (pre-)reading skills. Study sample: An initial search a...

Comparing outcomes between patients with bilateral hearing aids (HAs), bilateral cochlear implants (CIs), and bimodal fittings (CI + HA) are difficult because of the variations in hearing performance between the different devices and patient groups. This may impact patient counselling, device selection, and hearing outcomes for listeners with more...

Introduction Listening is the gateway to children learning in the mainstream classroom. However, modern classrooms are noisy and dynamic environments making listening challenging. It is therefore critical for researchers from speech and hearing, education, and health sciences to co-design and collaborate to realistically assess how children listen...

Objective: This study examined (1) the utility of a clinical system to record acoustic change complex (ACC, an event-related potential recorded by electroencephalography) for assessing speech discrimination in infants, and (2) the relationship between ACC and functional performance in real life. Methods: Participants included 115 infants (43 nor...

Background: Despite hearing aids adequately compensate for hearing loss, a substantial proportion of the population leave their hearing difficulties untreated. Even though this is a well-known clinical issue, the optimal approach to address this issue during the hearing rehabilitation process is still unclear. Purpose: The present study aims to cha...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02383.].

Acoustic change complex (ACC) is a cortical auditory-evoked potential induced by a change of continuous sound stimulation. This study aimed to explore: (1) whether the change of horizontal sound location can elicit ACC; (2) the relationship between the change of sound location and the amplitude or latency of ACC; (3) the relationship between the be...

Background: Infants and toddlers are still being evaluated for their hearing sensitivity but not their auditory processing skills. Iterated Rippled Noise (IRN) stimuli require the auditory system to utilize the temporal periodicity and auto-correlate the iterations to perceive pitch. Purpose: This study investigated the acoustic change complex (...

Objective Examine the effect of language experience on auditory evoked and oscillatory brain responses to lexical tone in passive (ACC) and active (P300) listening conditions. Design Language experience was evaluated using two groups, Mandarin- vs. English-listeners (with vs. without lexical tone experience). Two Mandarin lexical tones with pitch...

Objective Recent literature has highlighted a link between hearing loss as a result of otitis media in the early years of life and impacted binaural processing skills in later childhood. Such findings are of particular relevance to Indigenous Australian children, who tend to experience otitis media earlier in life and for longer periods than their...

Objective To design and evaluate the effectiveness of a stimulus material in eliciting the N400 event related potential (ERP). Design A set of 700 semantically congruent and incongruent sentences was developed in accordance with current linguistic norms, and validated with an electroencephalography (EEG) study, in which the influence of age and ge...

Background Some children appear to not hear well in class despite normal hearing sensitivity. These children may be referred for auditory processing disorder (APD) assessment but can also have attention, language, and/or reading disorders. Despite presenting with similar concerns regarding hearing difficulties in difficult listening conditions, the...

Objective: Research has found that otitis media (OM) is highly prevalent in Australian Indigenous children, and repeated bouts of OM is often associated with minimal-to-moderate hearing loss. However, what is not yet clear is the extent to which OM with hearing loss impacts auditory signal processing specifically, but also binaural listening, list...

Objectives To document the auditory processing, visual attention, digit memory, phonological processing, and receptive language abilities of individual children with identified word reading difficulties.DesignTwenty-five children with word reading difficulties and 28 control children with good word reading skills participated. All children were age...

Objective: The ability to determine the location of the sound source is often important for effective communication. However, it is not clear how the localisation is affected by background noise. In the current study, localisation in quiet versus noise was evaluated in adults both behaviourally, and using MMN and P3b. Design: The speech token/da/wa...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify the main factors that differentiate listeners with clinically normal or "near-normal" hearing with regard to their speech-in-noise perception and to develop a regression model to predict speech-in-noise difficulties in this population. We also aimed to assess the potential effectiveness of the f...

Recent animal studies have shown that the synapses between inner hair cells and the dendrites of the spiral ganglion cells they innervate are the elements in the cochlea most vulnerable to excessive noise exposure. Particularly in rodents, several studies have concluded that exposure to high level octave-band noise for 2 h leads to an irreversible...

Objectives: Previous research shows that children with reading disorders perform poorly on auditory processing (AP) tasks. Correlational studies have also shown significant associations between some AP tasks and word and nonword reading. There is less clear evidence for AP contributions to spelling and passage reading. The aim of this research was...

Background: Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early and chronic otitis media (OM) which is difficult to treat and has lifelong impacts in health and education. The LiTTLe Program (Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn) aimed to increase infants' access to spoken language input, teach parents to...

Hearing impairment affects a person’s ability to communicate effectively. People with hearing loss (HL) report difficulty communicating in noise, even when the HL is compensated by conventional amplification. This study aims to investigate factors that contribute to understanding speech in noise. Nine adults with HL and nine controls participated i...

Background: Classrooms can be noisy and are challenging listening environments for children with auditory processing disorder (APD). This research was undertaken to determine if the Listening Inventory for Education-UK version (LIFE-UK) can differentiate children with listening difficulties and APD from their typically developing peers. Purpose: To...

Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of auditory and cognitive processing in the research and clinical laboratories. There is currently no consensus on the choice of appropriate reference for auditory ERPs. The most commonly used references in auditory ERP research are the mathematically linked-m...

Objective: The current research investigated whether professional musicians outperformed non-musicians on auditory processing and speech-in-noise perception as assessed using behavioural and electrophysiological tasks. Design: Spectro-temporal processing skills were assessed using a psychoacoustic test battery. Speech-in-noise perception was mea...

Objectives: Identification and discrimination of speech sounds in noisy environments is challenging for adults and even more so for infants and children. Behavioral studies consistently report maturational differences in the influence that signal to noise ratio (SNR) and masker type have on speech processing; however, few studies have investigated...

Binaural hearing helps normal-hearing listeners localize sound sources and understand speech in noise. However, it is not fully understood how far this is the case for bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users. To determine the potential benefits of bilateral over unilateral CIs, speech comprehension thresholds (SCTs) were measured in seven Japanese bi...

Objectives: Identification and discrimination of speech sounds in noisy environments is challenging for adults, and even more so for infants and children. Behavioural studies consistently report maturational differences in the influence that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and masker type have on speech processing; however, few studies have investigate...

Recent animal research has shown that exposure to single episodes of intense noise causes cochlear synaptopathy without affecting hearing thresholds. It has been suggested that the same may occur in humans. If so, it is hypothesized that this would result in impaired encoding of sound and lead to difficulties hearing at suprathreshold levels, parti...

Objectives: Objective: Statistical learning (SL) is an implicit ability to extract statistical cues from continuous stream of stimuli. This study compared behavioural and online (electrophysiological) measures of SL in children with and without musical training. Material and methods: SL of regularities embedded in auditory and visual stimuli was me...

Objective The question whether musical training is associated with enhanced auditory and cognitive abilities in children is of considerable interest. In the present study, we compared children with music training versus those without music training across a range of auditory and cognitive measures, including the ability to detect implicitly statist...

Musicians’ brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long-term musical training. In this study, we examined implicit extraction of statistical regularities from a continuous stream of stimuli—statistical learning (SL). We investigated whether long-term musical trai...

The main aim of this study was to use spectral smearing to evaluate the efficacy of a spectral ripple test (SRt) using stationary sounds and a recent variant with gliding ripples called the spectro-temporal ripple test (STRt) in measuring reduced spectral resolution. In experiment 1 the highest detectable ripple density was measured using four amou...

It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing and cognitive abilities. Recent research has examined the relationship between musicians’ advantage and implicit statistical learning skills. In the present study, we assessed a variety of auditory processing skills, cognitive processing skills, and stat...

Better-ear glimpsing (BEG) is a phenomenon that helps understanding speech in the presence of fluctuating, spatially separated distractors. This phenomenon has been studied in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired listeners but remains untapped in adults with cochlear implants (CIs). Further, it has not been investigated how far providing CIs in...

Background: Some adults, particularly those with a history of noise exposure, report hearing problems, especially understanding speech in background noise yet their hearing test results are clinically normal. Recent animal studies suggest that such difficulties might be the result of noise-induced damage to the synaptic connections between auditory...

Background: Hidden hearing loss (HHL) is a term used to describe noise-induced cochlear neuropathy involving the selective loss of high-threshold auditory nerve fibres without affecting auditory thresholds, but resulting in perceptual deficits such as difficulty understanding speech in background noise. Previous research suggests that musical train...

Background & Aim: Statistical learning (SL) is a domain-general learning mechanism that is utilised by humans and primates to assess large amounts of sensory information, and extract important cues, across multiple modalities. Statistical learning has been speculated to assist with speech perception in noise. While there is evidence concerning stat...

This study investigated whether a short intensive psychophysical auditory training program is associated with speech perception benefits and changes in cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) in adult cochlear implant (CI) users. Ten adult implant recipients trained approximately 7 hours on psychophysical tasks (Gap-in-Noise Detection, Frequenc...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1055/s-0035-1570335.].

Objective: We sought to examine whether oscillatory EEG responses to a speech stimulus in both quiet and noise were different in children with listening problems than in children with normal hearing. Methods: We employed a high-resolution spectral-temporal analysis of the cortical auditory evoked potential in response to a 150 ms speech sound /d...

This study investigated the relationship between both receptive and expressive prosody and each of three reading outcomes: accuracy of reading aloud words, accuracy of reading aloud nonwords, and comprehension. Participants were 63 children aged 7 to 12 years. To assess prosody, we used the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech Communication (PEP...

This paper reports on two of the probably many reasons why hearing impaired people need better signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) than others to communicate in background noise, and shows the effectiveness of beamforming in addressing this deficit. The first reason is inaudibility of high-frequency sounds, even when aided, as these sounds have the large...

Background: Children clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APDs) are often described as easily distracted and inattentive, leading some researchers to propose that APDs might be a consequence of underlying attention difficulties or a subtype of attention disorders. Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the link betwee...

We investigated if long-term musical training is associated with facilitation of extraction of distributional cues in an online auditory statistical learning (ASL) and visual statistical learning (VSL) task. Participants were seventeen musicians and eighteen age-matched non-musicians. Event related potentials were recorded as participants listened...

Objectives: Musicians’ brains are considered as a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long term musical training. Statistical learning is an implicit ability to extract distributional cues from continuous stream of stimuli. This study investigated if long term musical training is associat...

Objectives: Deficits in auditory attention switching have been identified as a potential underlying problem in some individuals who struggle with speech perception in the presence of noise. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate the underlying markers of this skill using adult participants. It is hoped that by developing a greater u...

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on infant cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs). These responses are currently used in some clinics to verify audibility of speech sounds in infants with hearing loss who use hearing devices. One area of concern for the clinical use of CAEPs is...

Objectives: Previous research has clearly shown that musicians enjoy an advantage in auditory processing. The current research investigated the effects of musical experience on speech perception in noise and aimed to investigate evidence of differences in speech perception using behavioural methods and cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs). I...

To examine the links between auditory processing (AP) test results, functional deficits, and cognitive abilities. One hundred and fifty-five children, ages 7-12 years, comprising 50 control children and 105 children referred for AP assessment, all with normal peripheral hearing, completed an AP and cognitive (sustained attention, auditory working m...

An important goal of providing amplification to children with hearing loss is to ensure that hearing aids are adjusted to match targets of prescriptive procedures as closely as possible. The Desired Sensation Level (DSL) v5 and the National Acoustic Laboratories' prescription for nonlinear hearing aids, version 1 (NAL-NL1) procedures are widely use...

Aim To determine whether Acoustic Change Complex is a measure of pitch perception. Method 10 adults between and including the ages 18-35 years and 10 children between and including the ages 8-12 years with normal hearing and speech language development undertook a 25 channel electrophysiological assessment in an electrically shielded and soundproof...

Previous research has shown that musicians enjoy an advantage in auditory processing. The current research investigated the effects of musical experience on speech perception in noise and auditory processing. Ten musicians and ten non-musicians between the ages of 20 and 60 participated in this study. Spectrotemporal auditory processing was assesse...

Aims Present study Aims to investigate the contribution of auditory processing abilities and statistical learning abilities towards speech perception in noise in musicians. Methodology We propose to evaluate auditory and visual statistical learning in 10 musicians and non-musicians using a behavioural and electrophysiological approach. We have modi...

Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) are included in guidelines for assessment of auditory processing disorder (APD), but their diagnostic value and their use as a measure of treatment effectiveness have not been fully explored. The current study has three main aims: (1) to assess if there are differences in CAEPs recorded in quiet and in no...

Young adults with no history of hearing concerns were tested to investigate their /da/-evoked cortical auditory evoked potentials (P1-N1-P2) recorded from 32 scalp electrodes in the presence and absence of noise at three different loudness levels (soft, comfortable, and loud), at a fixed signal-to-noise ratio (+3 dB). P1 peak latency significantly...

Objective: The study aims to compare the performance of hearing aids fitted according to the NAL-NL1 and DSL v5 prescriptive procedure for children. Design: This is a crossover four period trial. Study sample: Sixteen school-aged children with moderately severe to profound hearing losses participated in the study. The children were fitted with...

The aim of this research was to evaluate the ability to switch attention and selectively attend to relevant information in children (10-15 years) with persistent listening difficulties in noisy environments. A wide battery of clinical tests indicated that children with complaints of listening difficulties had otherwise normal hearing sensitivity an...

Switch Attention to Listen

A presentation for a multi-disciplinary audience; introducing cochlear implants and auditory perception along with novel data on evoked potentials in response to prosody detection. A speech science explanation of why cochlear implants are difficult to use in noise is provided.

Objective: To determine stimulus level effects on speech-evoked cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) in infants for a low (/m/) and high (/t/) frequency speech sound. Methods: CAEPs were recorded for two natural speech tokens, /m/ and /t/. Participants were 16 infants aged 3-8months with no risk factors for hearing impairment, no parental...

The primary purpose of the study was to compare intervention approaches for children with auditory processing disorder (APD): bottom-up training including activities focused on auditory perception, discrimination, and phonological awareness, and top-down training including a range of language activities. Another purpose was to determine the benefit...

This case is of a 70-year-old man with single-sided deafness (SSD) in the right ear since childhood, who developed a sudden severe hearing loss in the left ear at the age of 63. Eventually, after he received cochlear implants in both ears, he started to present behavioural auditory processing skills associated with binaural hearing, such as improve...

Overview The overall goal of case management for school-aged children with an auditory processing disorder (APD) is to improve communication , learning, and quality of life for the child and his/ her family. This chapter discusses the management of APD within the context of the International Classification of Functioning , Disability and Health for...

FM systems have been used to compensate for poor signal-to-noise ratios in classrooms. This study evaluates benefits of a 6-week trial of personal FM systems used during the school day for children with reading delay aged 6-11 years, using a randomized control design. Teachers and children completed the LIFE-UK questionnaire. Test-retest reliabilit...

Purpose The authors assessed comorbidity of auditory processing disorder (APD), language impairment (LI), and reading disorder (RD) in school-age children. Method Children (N = 68) with suspected APD and nonverbal IQ standard scores of 80 or more were assessed using auditory, language, reading, attention, and memory measures. Auditory processing t...

Cochlear implant (CI) trends are changing as more recipients are receiving bilateral implantation. Also more pre-lingually deafened adults are choosing to be implanted. Clinical assessment after cochlear implantation is usually based on speech perception tests. Such tests, however, may not be a realistic outcome measure for some of these cases, cre...

A male with unilateral deafness in the right ear since 8 years of age developed a sudden hearing loss in the left ear at age 63. A hearing aid was fitted in the left ear with limited benefit. The right ear received a cochlear implant (CI) 20 months later. Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) and speech recognition scores (SRS) were measured...

Overview The overall goal of case management for school-aged children with an auditory processing disorder (APD) is to improve communication , learning, and quality of life for the child and his/ her family. This chapter discusses the management of APD within the context of the International Classification of Functioning , Disability and Health for...

The article presents a case study of a child ('Sally') with multiple risk factors for auditory processing disorder (APD), including low birth weight and a history of otitis media. Sally presented for auditory processing assessment at age 7 years 9 months due to learning difficulties, despite normal intelligence. Sally had persistent mild hearing lo...

The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading disorders and a control group. Cortical responses (P1 and N250) to the sound /da / were measured at interstimulus intervals of 538, 1072 and 2152 ms. As expected, owing to slow neural recovery periods, both groups showed longer cortical response latencies...

Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEP) were recorded from ten normal-hearing infants, aged 3 to 7 months, using the natural speech segments /m/ and /t/. The aim was to investigate the effect of selected stimulus durations and inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) on infant responses. In the first experiment, various stimulus durations were used but t...

The aim of the research was to investigate auditory processing abilities in children with reading disorders using electrophysiological and behavioral tasks. Differences in auditory processing between control, compensated (age appropriate reading skills with a history of reading disorder), and reading disordered groups were systematically investigat...

Hearing loss due to auditory neuropathy poses a number of challenges for paediatric audiologists who work with infants under 6 months of age. Behavioural hearing thresholds cannot be predicted from electrophysiological assessment and may vary from normal limits to profound hearing loss. The impact of the auditory neuropathy on a child's ability to...

Electrophysiological measures that can be used to objectively evaluate binaural interaction in cochlear implantees include the binaural interaction component (BIC) and an evoked potential analog of the 'masking-level difference' (MLD). Results from normal listeners show that cortical auditory-evoked responses obtained using these methods can be use...

The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN), extracting MMN from the deviant and standard waveforms, and identifying the response in children and adults. Several stimulus types were compared (pure tones, chords, and natural speech tokens) to determine which optimally elicit MMN...

Although auditory brainstem response (ABR) audiometry is widely used to assess hearing sensitivity in infants and young children, normal calibration values vary across clinics. This study was undertaken to determine normal hearing thresholds for tonebursts and clicks with insert earphones. Techniques for performing electroacoustic and behavioural c...