Principal Investigator/Program Director (Last, first, middle): Phillips, Susan L. DESCRIPTION: State the application's broad, long-term objectives and specific aims, making reference to the health relatedness of the project. Describe concisely the research design and methods for achieving these goals. Avoid summaries of past accomplishments and the use of the first person. This abstract is meant to serve as a succinct and accurate description of the proposed work when separated from the application. If the application is funded, this description, as is, will become public information. Therefore, do not include proprietary/confidential information. DO NOT EXCEED ]'HE SPACE PROVIDED. There is a subgroup of elderly hearing-impaired people who suffer exceptional communication deficits in the form of poor speech perception which is unaccounted for by the amount of hearing loss. Audiologists lack an understanding of their specific perceptual difficulties, and are unable to offer them adequate treatment.
The aim of this project is to uncover specific deficits involved and determine the potential for auditory training with digital enhancement of spectral cues. Long-term goals are to improve speech perception for these individuals with amplification and rehabilitation strategies. It is hypothesized that these listeners will demonstrate poorer voiced consonant recognition, wherein the use of spectral cues are deficient, and that digital enhancement of the spectral cue will be necessary in the auditory training process. Experiment I will confirm that these listeners will have different voiced consonant confusions than those with good speech perception, and whether voice gender or vowel context is pertinent to these confusions. This will be accomplished with a closed-set identification task of the voiced/b/, Idt, Igl,/m/, In/, Iv/, IzJ in the contexts of /i/,/a/, and lu! spoken by a male and a female, and presented at 95 dB SPL. Secondly, it will be determined which spectral cues are unutilized by the poor discriminators in the recognition of the Ib/-/dl and/m/-/nl distinctions in a single-interval, two-alternative forced-choice identification procedure of CV's edited to include only isolated spectral cues. Lastly the efficacy of psychoacoustic forced-choice training methods will be examined with a 12 dB digital enhancement of a particular spectral cue on the group of poor discriminators. Using forced-choice training measures and digital enhancement as part of auditory training with elderly listeners is innovative. The lack of success we have had as audiologists in improving the quality of life for these people is am important clinical problem that has not been hitherto addressed. The findings from the proposed research will provide specific information on the perceptual deficits experienced by this group of people. This is a necessary first step towards devising successful amplification and rehabilitation strategies in order to bring these people out of the isolation caused by the inabilityto communicate effectively. The outcomes of this project are expected to provide the background necessary to make a competetive R01 bid. PERFORMANCE SITE ========================================Section End===========================================
| Phillips, Susan L; Richter, Scott J; McPherson, David (2009) Voiced initial consonant perception deficits in older listeners with hearing loss and good and poor word recognition. J Speech Lang Hear Res 52:118-29 |
