Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People

Hearing Loss, Sensorineural Clinical Trial

Official title:

Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Completed

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT01867515
• Other study ID #: C1020-R
• Secondary ID: 5I01RX001020-03
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• First received: May 20, 2013
• Last updated: April 24, 2018
• Start date: August 2013
• Est. completion date: September 2016

Study information

• Verified date: April 2018
• Source: VA Office of Research and Development
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial 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.

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.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Enrollment: 50
• Est. completion date: September 2016
• Est. primary completion date: September 2016
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: All
• Age group: 18 Years to 65 Years

Eligibility

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

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Deafness
• Hearing Loss
• Hearing Loss, Sensorineural

Intervention

Other:
• Acoustic distortion of speech

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United States	VA Portland Health Care System, Portland, OR	Portland	Oregon

Sponsors (1)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
VA Office of Research and Development

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United States, 

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	Percent Correct Words Identified	The experimental approach compares speech identification performance among younger, normally-hearing listeners, older normally-hearing listeners and hearing-impaired listeners. Tasks will be carried out in quiet and in the presence of continuous, speech-shaped background noise. The investigators compared the understanding of unprocessed stimuli with 1) time-compressed stimuli, 2) time-compressed stimuli expanded in time via gaps and 3) uncompressed stimuli where portions of the signal were replaced with silence. Experimental metrics were percentage of correct/incorrect speech identification in each listening condition.	average of two blocks per condition obtained over the course of up to three 2-hour visits, spaced an average of one week apart