Hearing AND voices

PURPOSE: To assess the influence of the listener experience, measurement scales and the type of speech task on the auditory-perceptual evaluation of the overall severity (OS) of voice deviation and the predominant type of voice (rough, breathy or strain). METHODS: 22 listeners, divided into four groups participated in the study: speech-language pathologist specialized in voice (SLP-V), SLP non specialized in voice (SLP-NV), graduate students with auditory-perceptual analysis training (GS-T), and graduate students without auditory-perceptual analysis training (GS-U)...

Hearing aids and other hearing devices should provide the user with a benefit, for example, compensate for effects of a hearing loss or cancel undesired sounds. However, wearing hearing devices can also have negative effects on perception, previously demonstrated mostly for spatial hearing, sound quality and the perception of the own voice. When hearing devices are set to transparency, that is, provide no gain and resemble open-ear listening as well as possible, these side effects can be studied in isolation...

PURPOSE: We studied the role of gender in metacognition of voice emotion recognition ability (ERA), reflected by self-rated confidence (SRC). To this end, we guided our study in two approaches: first, by examining the role of gender in voice ERA and SRC independently and second, by looking for gender effects on the ERA association with SRC. METHOD: We asked 100 participants (50 men, 50 women) to interpret a set of vocal expressions portrayed by 30 actors (16 men, 14 women) as defined by their emotional meaning...

PURPOSE: Cisplatin is a low-cost clinical anti-tumor drug widely used to treat solid tumors. However, its use could damage cochlear hair cells, leading to irreversible hearing loss. Currently, there appears one drug approved in clinic only used for reducing ototoxicity associated with cisplatin in pediatric patients, which needs to further explore other candidate drugs. METHODS: Here, by screening 1967 FDA-approved drugs to protect cochlear hair cell line (HEI-OC1) from cisplatin damage, we found that Tedizolid Phosphate (Ted), a drug indicated for the treatment of acute infections, had the best protective effect...

BACKGROUND: Sheep have been proposed as a large-animal model for studying cochlear implantation. However, prior sheep studies report that the facial nerve (FN) obscures the round window membrane (RWM), requiring FN sacrifice or a retrofacial opening to access the middle-ear cavity posterior to the FN for cochlear implantation. We investigated surgical access to the RWM in Hampshire sheep compared to Suffolk-Dorset sheep and the feasibility of Hampshire sheep for cochlear implantation via a facial recess approach...

OBJECTIVES: Postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (CIs) have difficulties with perceiving differences in speakers' voice characteristics and benefit little from voice differences for the perception of speech in competing speech. However, not much is known yet about the perception and use of voice characteristics in prelingually deaf implanted children with CIs. Unlike CI adults, most CI children became deaf during the acquisition of language. Extensive neuroplastic changes during childhood could make CI children better at using the available acoustic cues than CI adults, or the lack of exposure to a normal acoustic speech signal could make it more difficult for them to learn which acoustic cues they should attend to...

INTRODUCTION: Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) is a speech and language disorder associated with difficulties in motor production, perception, and phonological representation of sounds and speech segments. Since auditory perception has a fundamental role in forming and organizing sound representation for its recognition, studies that evaluate the cortical processing of sounds are required. Thus, the present study aimed to verify the relation between SSD severity measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC) with the cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEP) using speech stimulus...

The advent of COVID-19 prompted the enforced isolation of elderly and vulnerable populations around the world, for their own safety. For people in prison, these restrictions risked compounding the isolation and harm they experienced. At the same time, the pandemic created barriers to prison oversight when it was most needed to ensure that the state upheld the rights and wellbeing of those in custody. This article reports findings from a unique collaboration in Ireland between the Office of the Inspector of Prisons - a national prison oversight body - and academic criminologists...

INTRODUCTION: Emotional contagion is achieved by inferring and emotionally resonating with other persons' feelings. It is unclear whether age-related changes in emotional contagion for infant sounds are modulated by the experience of childbirth or childcare. This study aims to evaluate changes in inference and emotional resonance for positive and negative infant sounds (laughter and crying) among women, based on age and parous experience. METHODS: A total of 241 women (60 young nulliparous, 60 young parous, 60 old nulliparous, and 61 old parous) completed a web-based questionnaire...

PURPOSE: Surface electromyography (sEMG) has been used to evaluate extrinsic laryngeal muscle activity during swallowing and phonation. In the current study, sEMG amplitudes were measured from the infrahyoid and suprahyoid muscles during phonation through a tube submerged in water. METHOD: The sEMG amplitude values measured from the extrinsic laryngeal muscles and the electroglottographic contact quotient (CQ) were obtained simultaneously from 62 healthy participants (31 men, 31 women) during phonation through a tube at six different depths (2, 4, 7, 10, 15, and 20 cm) while using two tubes with different diameters (1 and 0...

Elevated hearing thresholds cause disturbances in auditory control of voice. This leads to voice disorders that are described by changes in acoustic parameters of voice measured objectively. Voice changes can also be detected by perceptive assessment with GRBAS scale. This article presents the results of the study performed to analyze voice characteristics in a group of children with prelingual partial deafness (PD), a condition with normal hearing at low frequencies and deep hypoacusis (near deafness) at high frequencies...

PURPOSE: Reduced speech intelligibility is often a hallmark of children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP), but effects of speech strategies for increasing intelligibility are understudied, especially in children who speak languages other than English. This study examined the effects of (the Korean translation of) two cues, "speak with your big mouth" and "speak with your strong voice," on speech acoustics and intelligibility of Korean-speaking children with CP. METHOD: Fifteen Korean-speaking children with CP repeated words and sentences in habitual, big mouth, and strong voice conditions...

OBJECTIVE: Functional dysphonia can impair the language expression ability and adversely affect the career development of some patients. Therefore, an active exploration of effective treatment options is imperative. This study investigated the effect of Akson therapy on acoustic parameters in patients with functional dysphonia. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this retrospective analysis, 79 patients with functional dysphonia who received conventional voice correction training from June 2020 to June 2021 were included in the reference group (RG)...

PURPOSE: Mismatch negativity (MMN) reflects a pre-perceptual neurophysiological response that is generated subconsciously due to the interruption of a memory trace of ongoing sensory events in the environment. It has been widely used by researchers to understand complex perceptual mechanisms. Furthermore, it has been recommended as an objective tool to investigate disorders related to auditory cognition in hearing aid and cochlear implant users. Many researchers suggest that utilizing a larger acoustic difference between standard and deviant stimuli within the oddball paradigm will lead to a more robust MMN response...

Glenis Long championed the application of quantitative psychophysical methods to understand comparative hearing abilities across species. She contributed the first psychophysical studies of absolute and masked hearing sensitivities in an auditory specialist, the echolocating horseshoe bat. Her data demonstrated that this bat has hyperacute frequency discrimination in the 83-kHz range of its echolocation broadcast. This specialization facilitates the bat's use of Doppler shift compensation to separate echoes of fluttering insects from concurrent echoes of non-moving objects...

PURPOSE: Several treatment methods for hearing disorders rely on attaching medical devices to the tympanic membrane. This study aims to systematically analyze the effects of the material and geometrical properties and location of the medical devices attached to the tympanic membrane on middle-ear vibrations. METHODS: A finite-element model of the human middle ear was employed to simulate the effects of attachment of medical devices. Various types of material and geometrical properties, locations, and modeling scenarios were investigated for the medical device...

PURPOSE: To identify factors that influence vocal habits during online meetings (OMs). METHODS: A prospective trial of forty participants without any known hearing or vocal cord disorders. Subjects participated in an OM divided into six randomly ordered sections, with alterations in audio/speaking equipment and language: the computer's speaker-microphone, a single earbud, two-earbuds or headphones; with/without video, native-language-speaking (Hebrew) versus second language-speaking (English)...

An objective method for assessing speech audibility is essential to evaluate hearing aid benefit in children who are unable to participate in hearing tests. With consonant-vowel syllables, brainstem-dominant responses elicited at the voice fundamental frequency have proven successful for assessing audibility. This study aimed to harness the neural activity elicited by the slow envelope of the same repetitive consonant-vowel syllables to assess audibility. In adults and children with normal hearing and children with hearing loss wearing hearing aids, neural activity elicited by the stimulus /su∫i/ or /sa∫i/ presented at 55-75 dB SPL was analyzed using the temporal response function approach...

INTRODUCTION: Voice therapy (VT), a cornerstone in dysphonia treatment, relies on patient adherence for efficacy. Despite its positive outcomes, adherence rates remain consistently low. This study investigates the impact of cultural background on adherence to VT. METHODS: This is a retrospective cohort study that included all adult patients referred to our institution's Speech and Hearing unit, in 2018 for VT related to dysphonia. The study group included a distinct adult minority group (Bedouin Arabs) which was compared to a control group...

Background: Many health professionals report feeling uncomfortable talking with patients who hear voices. Patients who hear voices report feeling a lack of support and empathy from emergency nurses. A local emergency department reported a need for training for nurses in the care of behavioral health patients. Objective: The aim of this study is to implement a quality improvement project using a hearing voices simulation. Empathy was measured using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, and a post-intervention survey was used to evaluate emergency nurses' perception of the professional development session...