Clinical trial NCT01867515: Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People
Official title: Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Keywords: Hearing
Hearing Loss, sensorineural
Speech Perception
Lead sponsor: VA Office of Research and Development
Sponsor class: FED
First posted: 2013-06-04
Enrollment: 50
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 65
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose: OTHER

Brief summary: The purpose of this program of research is to understand the perception of the dynamic spectral properties of speech by hearing-impaired listeners, with the long-term goal of improving speech understanding by these individuals in adverse listening conditions. The proposed research compares the performance of normally-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners on measures of speech understanding in the presence of different types of signal distortion and speech understanding of signals with enhanced spectral dynamics. A computational model based on the amount of potential information available in speech will be used to quantify differences in speech intelligibility due to hearing status and stimulus characteristics.

Detailed description: This is a behavioral study of human auditory perception. Each experiment in this study involves prospective data collection from three types of listeners. The experimental listeners will be people with sensorineural hearing loss and the control listeners will either be subjects with normal hearing or normal-hearing listeners for whom hearing loss will be simulated through the use of a spectrally-shaped broadband noise. The tasks of the subjects in this study involve either listening to synthesized sounds over earphones while seated comfortably in a sound-treated booth, and making responses indicating the subject's auditory perception of these sounds by touching specific areas on a touch-screen terminal; or, listening to recorded, acoustically modified syllables, words, or sentences over earphones and making responses indicating the subject's identification.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* individuals with hearing thresholds of 20 dB HL or better at all octave frequencies between 250 Hz and 4000 Hz
* or, individuals with bilateral sensorineural hearing losses with thresholds between 25 and 70 dB HL and no losses greater than 70 dB HL at frequencies of 4000 Hz or below

Exclusion Criteria:

* a conductive hearing impairment or other otological pathology
* hearing thresholds greater than 70 dB HL at any frequencies of 4000 Hz or below or pure-tone averages (averaged across 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz) of greater than 65 dB HL
* bilateral differences greater than 20 dB at any frequency below 4000 Hz
* an inability to complete the experimental tasks

Primary outcomes:
measure: Percent Correct Words Identified
timeFrame: average of two blocks per condition obtained over the course of up to three 2-hour visits, spaced an average of one week apart
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Portland
country: United States
facility: VA Portland Health Care System, Portland, OR
state: Oregon
Study officials:
affiliation: VA Portland Health Care System, Portland, OR
name: Michelle R Molis, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: