Browsing by Subject "Hearing aids"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    An analysis of hearing aid fittings in adults using cochlear implants and contralateral hearing aids
    (Wiley, 2010-12) Harris, Michael S.; Hay-McCutcheon, Marcia; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: The objective of this study was to assess the appropriateness of hearing aid fittings within a sample of adult cochlear implant recipients who use a hearing aid in the contralateral ear (i.e., bimodal stimulation). METHODS: The hearing aid gain was measured using real ear testing for 14 postlingually deaf English-speaking adults who use a cochlear implant in the contralateral ear. Unaided and aided audiometric testing assessed the degree of functional gain derived from hearing aid use. RESULTS: On average, the target to actual output level difference was within 10 dB only at frequencies of 750 Hz and 1,000 Hz. Only 1 of the 14 study participants had a hearing aid for which the majority of the tested frequencies were within 10 dB of the target gain. In addition, a greater amount of functional gain (i.e., the increase in unaided behavioral thresholds after amplification) was provided for lower frequencies than higher frequencies. CONCLUSIONS: Hearing aid settings in our sample were suboptimal and may be regarded as a contributing factor to the variability in bimodal benefit. Refining hearing aid fitting strategies tailored to the needs of the concurrent cochlear implant and hearing aid user is recommended.
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    Executive functioning and spoken language skills in young children with hearing aids and cochlear implants: Longitudinal findings
    (Frontiers Media, 2022-09-23) Jamsek, Izabela A.; Kronenberger, William G.; Pisoni, David B.; Holt, Rachael Frush; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    Deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use auditory-oral communication display considerable variability in spoken language and executive functioning outcomes. Furthermore, language and executive functioning skills are strongly associated with each other in DHH children, which may be relevant for explaining this variability in outcomes. However, longitudinal investigations of language and executive functioning during the important preschool period of development in DHH children are rare. This study examined the predictive, reciprocal associations between executive functioning and spoken language over a 1-year period in samples of 53 DHH and 59 typically hearing (TH) children between ages 3-8 years at baseline. Participants were assessed on measures of receptive spoken language (vocabulary, sentence comprehension, and following spoken directions) and caregiver-completed executive functioning child behavior checklists during two in-person home visits separated by 1 year. In the sample of DHH children, better executive functioning at baseline (Time 1) was associated with better performance on the higher-order language measures (sentence comprehension and following spoken directions) 1 year later (Time 2). In contrast, none of the Time 1 language measures were associated with better executive functioning in Time 2 in the DHH sample. TH children showed no significant language-executive functioning correlations over the 1-year study period. In regression analyses controlling for Time 1 language scores, Time 1 executive functioning predicted Time 2 language outcomes in the combined DHH and TH samples, and for vocabulary, that association was stronger in the DHH than in the TH sample. In contrast, after controlling for Time 1 executive functioning, none of the regression analyses predicting Time 2 executive functioning from Time 1 language were statistically significant. These results are the first findings to demonstrate that everyday parent-rated executive functioning behaviors predict basic (vocabulary) and higher-order (comprehension, following directions) spoken language development 1 year later in young (3-8 year old) DHH children, even after accounting for initial baseline language skills.
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    New directions for assessing speech perception in persons with sensory aids
    (Sage, 1995) Kirk, K. I.; Pisoni, D. B.; Sommers, M. S.; Young, M.; Evanson, C.; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    This study examined the influence of stimulus variability and lexical difficulty on the speech perception performance of adults who used either multichannel cochlear implants or conventional hearing aids. The effects of stimulus variability were examined by comparing word identification in single-talker versus multiple-talker conditions. Lexical effects were assessed by comparing recognition of "easy" words (ie, words that occur frequently and have few phonemically similar words, or neighbors) with "hard" words (ie, words with the opposite lexical characteristics). Word recognition performance was assessed in either closed- or open-set response formats. The results demonstrated that both stimulus variability and lexical difficulty influenced word recognition performance. Identification scores were poorer in the multiple-talker than in the single-talker conditions. Also, scores for lexically "easy" items were better than those for "hard" items. The effects of stimulus variability were not evident when a closed-set response format was employed.