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Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training

Hearing aids (HAs) only partially restore the ability of older hearing impaired (OHI) listeners to understand speech in noise, due in large part to persistent deficits in consonant identification. Here, we investigated whether adaptive perceptual training would improve consonant-identification in no...

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Autores principales: Woods, David L., Doss, Zoe, Herron, Timothy J., Arbogast, Tanya, Younus, Masood, Ettlinger, Marc, Yund, E. William
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346400/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25730330
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113965
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author Woods, David L.
Doss, Zoe
Herron, Timothy J.
Arbogast, Tanya
Younus, Masood
Ettlinger, Marc
Yund, E. William
author_facet Woods, David L.
Doss, Zoe
Herron, Timothy J.
Arbogast, Tanya
Younus, Masood
Ettlinger, Marc
Yund, E. William
author_sort Woods, David L.
collection PubMed
description Hearing aids (HAs) only partially restore the ability of older hearing impaired (OHI) listeners to understand speech in noise, due in large part to persistent deficits in consonant identification. Here, we investigated whether adaptive perceptual training would improve consonant-identification in noise in sixteen aided OHI listeners who underwent 40 hours of computer-based training in their homes. Listeners identified 20 onset and 20 coda consonants in 9,600 consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables containing different vowels (/ɑ/, /i/, or /u/) and spoken by four different talkers. Consonants were presented at three consonant-specific signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) spanning a 12 dB range. Noise levels were adjusted over training sessions based on d’ measures. Listeners were tested before and after training to measure (1) changes in consonant-identification thresholds using syllables spoken by familiar and unfamiliar talkers, and (2) sentence reception thresholds (SeRTs) using two different sentence tests. Consonant-identification thresholds improved gradually during training. Laboratory tests of d’ thresholds showed an average improvement of 9.1 dB, with 94% of listeners showing statistically significant training benefit. Training normalized consonant confusions and improved the thresholds of some consonants into the normal range. Benefits were equivalent for onset and coda consonants, syllables containing different vowels, and syllables presented at different SNRs. Greater training benefits were found for hard-to-identify consonants and for consonants spoken by familiar than unfamiliar talkers. SeRTs, tested with simple sentences, showed less elevation than consonant-identification thresholds prior to training and failed to show significant training benefit, although SeRT improvements did correlate with improvements in consonant thresholds. We argue that the lack of SeRT improvement reflects the dominant role of top-down semantic processing in processing simple sentences and that greater transfer of benefit would be evident in the comprehension of more unpredictable speech material.
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spelling pubmed-43464002015-03-17 Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training Woods, David L. Doss, Zoe Herron, Timothy J. Arbogast, Tanya Younus, Masood Ettlinger, Marc Yund, E. William PLoS One Research Article Hearing aids (HAs) only partially restore the ability of older hearing impaired (OHI) listeners to understand speech in noise, due in large part to persistent deficits in consonant identification. Here, we investigated whether adaptive perceptual training would improve consonant-identification in noise in sixteen aided OHI listeners who underwent 40 hours of computer-based training in their homes. Listeners identified 20 onset and 20 coda consonants in 9,600 consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables containing different vowels (/ɑ/, /i/, or /u/) and spoken by four different talkers. Consonants were presented at three consonant-specific signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) spanning a 12 dB range. Noise levels were adjusted over training sessions based on d’ measures. Listeners were tested before and after training to measure (1) changes in consonant-identification thresholds using syllables spoken by familiar and unfamiliar talkers, and (2) sentence reception thresholds (SeRTs) using two different sentence tests. Consonant-identification thresholds improved gradually during training. Laboratory tests of d’ thresholds showed an average improvement of 9.1 dB, with 94% of listeners showing statistically significant training benefit. Training normalized consonant confusions and improved the thresholds of some consonants into the normal range. Benefits were equivalent for onset and coda consonants, syllables containing different vowels, and syllables presented at different SNRs. Greater training benefits were found for hard-to-identify consonants and for consonants spoken by familiar than unfamiliar talkers. SeRTs, tested with simple sentences, showed less elevation than consonant-identification thresholds prior to training and failed to show significant training benefit, although SeRT improvements did correlate with improvements in consonant thresholds. We argue that the lack of SeRT improvement reflects the dominant role of top-down semantic processing in processing simple sentences and that greater transfer of benefit would be evident in the comprehension of more unpredictable speech material. Public Library of Science 2015-03-02 /pmc/articles/PMC4346400/ /pubmed/25730330 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113965 Text en https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Public Domain declaration, which stipulates that, once placed in the public domain, this work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose.
spellingShingle Research Article
Woods, David L.
Doss, Zoe
Herron, Timothy J.
Arbogast, Tanya
Younus, Masood
Ettlinger, Marc
Yund, E. William
Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title_full Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title_fullStr Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title_full_unstemmed Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title_short Speech Perception in Older Hearing Impaired Listeners: Benefits of Perceptual Training
title_sort speech perception in older hearing impaired listeners: benefits of perceptual training
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346400/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25730330
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113965
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