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139
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Introduction
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May 1999 - November 2017
May 1999 - present
Publications
Publications (139)
Objectives:
The purpose of this study was to investigate a policy-related factor and patient-related factors that might affect hearing aid adoption for adults, specifically price unbundling, and demographic and audiologic factors, respectively.
Design:
Retrospective data from hearing aid consultation appointments in an audiology clinic in a medi...
BACKGROUND
Only 15% of the nearly 30 million Americans with hearing loss use hearing aids, partly due to high cost, stigma, and limited access to required prior medical evaluations. Hearing impairment in adults can lead to social isolation and depression and is associated with an increased risk of falls as well as dementia. Given the persistent bar...
Background
Only 15% of the nearly 30 million Americans with hearing loss use hearing aids, partly due to high cost, stigma, and limited access to professional hearing care. Hearing impairment in adults can lead to social isolation and depression and is associated with an increased risk of falls. Given the persistent barriers to hearing aid use, the...
Objectives
Active listening in everyday settings is challenging and requires substantial mental effort, particularly in noisy settings. In some cases, effortful listening can lead to significant listening-related fatigue and negatively affect quality of life. However, our understanding of factors that affect the severity of fatigue is limited. Hear...
Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate whether a brief
speech-in-noise training with a remote microphone (RM) system (favorable
listening condition) would contribute to enhanced post-training
plasticity changes in the auditory system of school-age children.
Design: Before training, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded
f...
Objectives:
Recognizing speech through telecommunication can be challenging in unfavorable listening conditions. Text supplementation or provision of facial cues can facilitate speech recognition under some circumstances. However, our understanding of the combined benefit of text and facial cues in telecommunication is limited. The purpose of this...
Purpose
Mixed historical data on how listening effort is affected by reverberation and listener-to-speaker distance challenge existing models of listening effort. This study investigated the effects of reverberation and listener-to-speaker distance on behavioral and subjective measures of listening effort: (a) when listening at a fixed signal-to-no...
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of file compression on clinically measured word recognition scores obtained using the Northwestern University Test Number Six (NU-6; Auditec recording) materials.
Method
Participants were 86 adults (N = 170 ears; M age = 65.5). The 25 most difficult words from each of four NU-6 test list...
The recent hearing aid fitting standard for adults outlines the minimum practice for audiologists fitting adult patients with hearing loss. This article focuses on three items of the standard (5, 6, and 7), which focus on the selection of unilateral/bilateral hearing aids, hearing aid style, and coupling, in addition to feature selection. The stand...
Objectives
To evaluate risk for noise-induced hearing damage from otologic surgery-related noise exposure, given recent research indicating that noise levels previously believed to be safe and without long-term consequence may result in cochlear synaptopathy with subsequent degeneration of spiral ganglion neurons, degradation of neural transmission...
Objective
To present key data from a private marketing report that characterizes US hearing aid (HA) utilization, HA candidate and user population sizes, and HA pricing.
Patients
HA candidates and users in the United States.
Interventions
Hearing amplification.
Main Outcome Measures
HA utilization, HA candidate and user population sizes, HA mark...
Objective
The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical directional microphone settings on speech recognition, localisation and microphone preference in listening conditions with on- and off-axis talkers.
Design
A within-subjects repeated-measure evaluation of three hearing aid microphone settings (bilateral o...
Hearing assistance and restoration devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants were originally designed for unilateral use to improve speech communications. However, the demands of understanding a conversation in noisy situations have led to these devices being increasingly prescribed bilaterally, in the hope that hearing-impaired listeners...
Purpose
This study sought to evaluate the effects of common hearing aid microphone technologies on speech recognition and listening effort, and to evaluate potential predictive factors related to microphone benefits for school-age children with hearing loss in a realistic listening situation.
Method
Children (n = 17, ages 10–17 years) with bilater...
Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) have been successfully used to explore the effects of noise on speech processing at the cortical level in adults and children. The purpose of this study was to determine whether +15dB signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), often recommended for optimal speech perception in children, elicit higher amplitude CAEPs...
Purpose
Previous evidence supports benefits of bilateral hearing aids, relative to unilateral hearing aid use, in laboratory environments using audio-only (AO) stimuli and relatively simple tasks. The purpose of this study was to evaluate bilateral hearing aid benefits in ecologically relevant laboratory settings, with and without visual cues. In a...
Background noise and reverberation levels in typical classrooms have negative effects on speech recognition, but their effects on listening effort and fatigue are less well understood. Based on the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening, noise and reverberation would be expected to increase both listening effort and fatigue. However, previ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to evaluate potential group differences between musicians and nonmusicians in their self-adjusted (SA) gain and compression settings for both music and speech stimuli. Speech recognition, sound quality, and strength of preference for the SA settings and the original prescriptive (National Acoustic Laboratories–...
The question of how hearing loss and hearing rehabilitation affect patients’ momentary emotional experiences is one that has received little attention but has considerable potential to affect patients’ psychosocial function. This article is a product from the Hearing, Emotion, Amplification, Research, and Training workshop, which was convened to de...
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of four subjective questions related to listening effort. A secondary purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of hearing aid beamforming microphone arrays on word recognition and listening effort.
Design:
Participants answered subjective questions immedia...
Background:
People with hearing loss experience difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments. Beamforming microphone arrays in hearing aids can improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and thus also speech recognition and subjective ratings. Unilateral beamformer arrays, also known as directional microphones, accomplish this improvement us...
Background:
Consistency of hearing aid and remote microphone system use declines as school-age children with hearing loss age. One indicator of hearing aid use time is data logging, another is parent report. Recent data suggest that parents overestimate their children's hearing aid use time relative to data logging. The potential reasons for this...
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of directional microphone use on laboratory measures of sentence recognition, listening effort and localisation. An additional purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of asymmetric directional microphone use on the same laboratory measures.
Design:
Three hearing aid condi...
Purpose
The purpose of the project was to investigate the effects modifying the secondary task in a dual-task paradigm to measure objective listening effort. To be specific, the complexity and depth of processing were increased relative to a simple secondary task.
Method
Three dual-task paradigms were developed for school-age children. The primary...
Purpose
The hearing aid microphone setting (omnidirectional or directional) can be selected manually or automatically. This study examined the percentage of time the microphone setting selected using each method was judged to provide the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the talkers of interest in school environments.
Method
A total of 26 child...
Purpose
The purposes of this investigation were (a) to evaluate the effects of hearing aid directional processing on subjective and objective listening effort and (b) to investigate the potential relationships between subjective and objective measures of effort.
Method
Sixteen adults with mild to severe hearing loss were tested with study hearing...
Background:
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) provides standards used to govern standardization of all hearing aids. If hearing aids do not meet specifications, there are potential negative implications for hearing aid users, professionals, and the industry. Recent literature has not investigated the proportion of new hearing aids i...
Purpose
Several studies have been devoted to understanding the frequency information available to adult users of cochlear implants when listening in quiet. The objective of this study was to construct frequency importance functions for a group of adults with cochlear implants and a group of adults with normal hearing both in quiet and in a +10 dB s...
Objectives:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of background noise and reverberation on listening effort. Four specific research questions were addressed related to listening effort. These questions were (A) With comparable word recognition performance across levels of reverberation, what are the effects of noise and reverber...
While evidence suggests that hearing aids can reduce listening effort, mixed results are often seen when examining the effect of specific hearing aid processing. Given methodological differences across studies, we speculated that not all paradigms are equally sensitive to changes in listening effort. Moreover, many traditional paradigms may not be...
Abstract Objective: While potentially improving audibility for listeners with considerable high frequency hearing loss, the effects of implementing nonlinear frequency compression (NFC) for listeners with moderate high frequency hearing loss are unclear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of activating NFC for listeners who ar...
Objectives:
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of changing the secondary task in dual-task paradigms that measure listening effort. Specifically, the effects of increasing the secondary task complexity or the depth of processing on a paradigm's sensitivity to changes in listening effort were quantified in a series of two experime...
Background:
Past research demonstrates that as the speech recognition performance of listeners fitted with omnidirectional hearing aids approaches maximum (ceiling), the benefit afforded by directional microphones is necessarily lessened. This effect could potentially eliminate the benefit provided by directional microphones in easier listening si...
Objective:
The purpose of this project was to examine the effect of changing motivation on subjective ratings of listening effort and on the likelihood that a listener chooses either a controlling or an avoidance coping strategy.
Design:
Two experiments were conducted, one with auditory-only (AO) and one with auditory-visual (AV) stimuli, both u...
The purpose of this study was to evaluate hearing aid users' performance on four tasks across three types of directional processing implemented by the same pair of commercially available behind-the-ear hearing aids. The three types of directional processing were mild, moderate, and strong. The mild processing aimed at emulating the directionality o...
Purpose:
To investigate the test-retest reliability of real-ear aided response (REAR) measures in open and closed hearing aid fittings in children using appropriate probe-microphone calibration techniques (stored equalization for open fittings and concurrent equalization for closed fittings).
Research design:
Probe-microphone measurements were c...
Objectives:
This study aimed to evaluate the potential utility of asymmetrical and symmetrical directional hearing aid fittings for school-age children in simulated classroom environments. This study also aimed to evaluate speech recognition performance of children with normal hearing in the same listening environments.
Design:
Two groups of sch...
Objectives:
The purpose of this article was to evaluate factors that influence the listening effort experienced when processing speech for people with hearing loss. Specifically, the change in listening effort resulting from introducing hearing aids, visual cues, and background noise was evaluated. An additional exploratory aim was to investigate...
Background:
Several self-report measures exist that target different aspects of outcomes for hearing aid use. Currently, no comprehensive questionnaire specifically assesses factors that may be important for differentiating outcomes pertaining to hearing aid style.
Purpose:
The goal of this work was to develop the Style Preference Survey (SPS),...
Background:
Understanding speech over the telephone when listening in noisy environments may present a significant challenge for listeners with moderate-to-severe hearing loss.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study was to compare speech recognition and subjective ratings across several hearing aid-based telephone listening strategies for individual...
: One purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the effect of a unilateral bone-anchored hearing aid (Baha) on horizontal plane localization performance in single-sided deaf adults who had either a conductive or sensorineural hearing loss in their impaired ear. The use of a 33-loudspeaker array allowed for a finer response measure than has prev...
Purpose
To investigate the effect of visual cues on listening effort as well as whether predictive variables such as working memory capacity (WMC) and lipreading ability affect the magnitude of listening effort.
Method
Twenty participants with normal hearing were tested using a paired-associates recall task in 2 conditions (quiet and noise) and 2...
Enhanced feedback suppression techniques are routinely introduced in hearing aids; however, the amount of additional gain before feedback (AGBF) and real ear insertion gain (REIG) provided has been shown to vary widely across and within hearing aids. Between 0 and 15 dB of AGBF has been reported for the feedback suppression algorithms of previous g...
The purpose of the study was to develop and examine a list of potential variables that may account for variability in the dispensing rates of four common hearing aid features. A total of 29 potential variables were identified and placed into the following categories: (1) characteristics of the audiologist, (2) characteristics of the hearing aids di...
The purpose of this study was to examine speech recognition through hearing aids for seven telephone listening conditions.
Speech recognition scores were measured for 20 participants in six wireless routing transmission conditions and one acoustic telephone condition. In the wireless conditions, the speech signal was delivered to both ears simultan...
An abstract is unavailable. This article is available as HTML full text and PDF.
The purpose of this investigation was to examine the potential for directional hearing aid benefit in listeners with severe hearing loss at multiple SNRs for both auditory only and audio-visual presentation modes. Speech recognition performance was measured using the connected speech test at six SNRs individually determined for each subject in orde...
This study examined the effects of extending high-frequency bandwidth, for both a speech signal and a background noise, on the acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of listeners with mild sensorineural hearing loss through utilization of the Acceptable Noise Level (ANL) procedure. In addition to extending high-frequency bandwidth, the effects of r...
This article summarizes data from a 3-year, double-blinded study of directional hearing aid benefit. Ninety-four subjects in three hearing loss groups, all previous users of omnidirectional output-compression hearing aids, completed all aspects of the study. Participants were fit with new hearing aids for 1 month in a directional mode and 1 month i...
To determine the amount of importance audiologists place on various items related to their selection of a preferred hearing aid brand manufacturer.
Three hundred forty-three hearing aid-dispensing audiologists rated a total of 32 randomized items by survey methodology.
Principle component analysis identified seven orthogonal statistical factors of...
New and improved methods of feedback suppression are routinely introduced in hearing aids; however, comparisons of additional gain before feedback (AGBF) values across instruments are complicated by potential variability across subjects and measurement methods.
To examine the variability in AGBF values across individual listeners and an acoustic ma...
Prior knowledge of where to listen significantly improves speech recognition of target sentences presented in the presence of distracter sentences coming from different locations [G. Kidd et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 118, 3804-3815 (2005)]. The present study extended the work of Kidd et al. by measuring the effect of a target's motion on its recogni...
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to examine children’s head orientation relative to the arrival angle of competing signals and the sound source of interest in actual school settings. These data were gathered to provide information relative to the potential for directional benefit.
Method
Forty children, 4–17 years of age, with and without hea...
Purpose
This study examined the impact that changing on-stage music and crowd noise levels during musical performance had on preferred listening levels (PLLs) and minimum acceptable listening levels (MALLs) across both floor and in-ear monitors.
Method
Participants for this study were 23- to 48-year-old musicians, with and without hearing loss, wh...
Purpose
One factor that has been shown to greatly affect sound quality is audible bandwidth. Provision of gain for frequencies above 4–6 kHz has not generally been supported for groups of hearing aid wearers. The purpose of this study was to determine if preference for bandwidth extension in hearing aid processed sounds was related to the magnitude...
: The main purpose of the study was to assess the ability of adults with unilateral cochlear implants to localize noise and speech signals in the horizontal plane.
: Six unilaterally implanted adults, all postlingually deafened and all fitted with MED-EL COMBI 40+ devices, were tested with a modified source identification task. Subjects were tested...
The main purpose of the study was to measure thresholds for interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) for acoustically presented noise signals in adults with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs). A secondary purpose was to assess the correlation between the ILD and ITD thresholds and error scores in a horizontal-plane...
Purpose
To examine speech recognition performance and subjective ratings for directional and omnidirectional microphone modes across a variety of simulated classroom environments.
Method
Speech recognition was measured in a group of 26 children age 10–17 years in up to 8 listening environments.
Results
Significant directional benefit was found wh...
The main purpose of the study was to assess the ability of adults with bilateral cochlear implants to localize noise and speech signals in the horizontal plane. A second objective was to measure the change in localization performance in these adults between approximately 5 and 15 mo after activation. A third objective was to evaluate the relative r...
The effect of feedback reduction (FBR) systems on sound quality recorded from two commercially available hearing aids was evaluated using paired comparison judgments by 16 participants with mild to severe sloping hearing loss. These comparisons were made with the FBR systems on and off without audible feedback and while attempting to control for di...
The benefits of directional processing in hearing aids are well documented in laboratory settings. Likewise, substantial research has shown that speech understanding is optimized in many settings when listening binaurally. Although these findings suggest that speech understanding would be optimized by using bilateral directional technology (e.g., a...
Recent research suggests that omnidirectional hearing aids are relatively ineffective at improving speech understanding in everyday conversational speech settings when the background noise contains both energetic and informational masking components. Energetic masking refers to situations where the peripheral (or neural) activity of the target is l...
The purpose of the current investigation was to compare speech recognition in noise for bilateral and unilateral modes within postlingually deafened, adult bilateral cochlear implant recipients. In addition, it was of interest to evaluate the time course of the bilateral speech-recognition advantage and the effect of changing signal-to-noise ratio...
An abstract is unavailable. This article is available as HTML full text and PDF.
Speech understanding in noise is affected by both the energetic and informational masking components of the background noise. In addition, when the background noise is everyday speech, the relative contributions of the energetic and informational masking components to the overall difficulties in understanding speech are unclear. This study estimate...
Directional amplification represents one of only a handful of methods that have been shown to consistently improve SNR for listeners across a wide range of noisy environments. Data supporting the use of these devices to aid the speech understanding of listeners with hearing loss in noisy situations are overwhelmingly positive. It is equally clear,...
The speech understanding of persons with sloping high-frequency (HF) hearing impairment (HI) was compared to normal hearing (NH) controls and previous research on persons with "flat" losses [Hornsby and Ricketts (2003). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, 1706-1717] to examine how hearing loss configuration affects the contribution of speech information in va...
The purpose of this investigation was to examine the potential for directional hearing aid benefit in listeners with severe hearing loss at multiple SNRs for both auditory only and audio-visual presentation modes. Speech recognition performance was measured using the connected speech test at six SNRs individually determined for each subject in orde...
The purpose of this investigation was to examine the potential for directional hearing aid benefit in listeners with severe hearing loss at multiple SNRs for both auditory only and audio-visual presentation modes. Speech recognition performance was measured using the connected speech test at six SNRs individually determined for each subject in orde...
The purpose of this investigation was to determine the impact of commonly recommended cochlear implant (CI) speech processor placements on microphone output both with and without single channel front-end compression. The impact of this compression use on interaural level difference (ILD) magnitude was also evaluated for the ear-level position. Fina...
The purpose of the current investigation was to systematically examine two of the assumptions central to the application of Articulation Index weighted Directivity Index (AI-DI) to the prediction of directional benefit across three groups of listeners differentiated by degree and configuration of hearing loss. Specifically, the assumption that (1)...
Directional microphone hearing aids can lead to improved speech recognition when speech and noise are coming from different directions. This technology provides limited benefits, however, and in specific instances use of a directional hearing aid mode can be detrimental. This article discusses the benefits and limitations of directional amplificati...
This brief report discusses the affect of digital noise reduction (DNR) processing on aided speech recognition and sound quality measures in 14 adults fitted with a commercial hearing aid. Measures of speech recognition and sound quality were obtained in two different speech-in-noise conditions (71 dBA speech, +6 dB SNR and 75 dBA speech, +1 dB SNR...
Two experiments were performed that examined adaptive directional benefit and directional benefit as a function of competing noise level. Fourteen bilaterally fitted adult listeners with sloping, sensorineural hearing loss participated in both experiments. The results of the first experiment provide additional support for an adaptive advantage in e...
An abstract is unavailable. This article is available as HTML full text and PDF.
The major findings of this study were as follows: There were no significant differences between the Audioscan and the ER-33 in assessing occlusion effect magnitude for the low frequencies. [+[When full-spectrum response curves were analyzed for measurements obtained with the Audioscan, three subjects demonstrated peak occlusion at a frequency beyon...
Understanding the potential benefits and limitations of directional hearing aids across a wide range of listening environments is important when counseling persons with hearing loss regarding realistic expectations for these devices. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of speaker-to-listener distance on directional benefit in two re...
So where does all this information leave us clinically? What conclusion can we draw? First, it is important to consider how fitting factors might impact directional benefit. The potential benefits and detriments of fitting decisions can then be accurately weighed in an attempt to maximize general hearing aid benefit and satisfaction. Secondly, and...