Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2017
Classrooms can be noisy and are challenging listening environments for children with auditory pro... more Classrooms can be noisy and are challenging listening environments for children with auditory processing disorder (APD). This research was undertaken to determine if the Listening Inventory for Education-UK version (LIFE-UK) can differentiate children with listening difficulties and APD from their typically developing peers.To investigate reliability and validity of the student and teacher versions LIFE-UK questionnaire for assessing classroom listening difficulties.Cross-sectional quantitative study comparing children with listening difficulties with typically developing children.In total, 143 children (7–12 yr) participated; 45 were diagnosed with APD. Fifteen participants with reported listening difficulties who passed the APD test battery were assigned to a “listening difficulty” (LiD) group. Eighty three children from nine classrooms formed a Control group.Children and teachers completed the LIFE-UK questionnaire student and teacher versions. Factor analysis was undertaken, and...
This study investigated whether a short intensive psychophysical auditory training program is ass... more This study investigated whether a short intensive psychophysical auditory training program is associated with speech perception benefits and changes in cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) in adult cochlear implant (CI) users. Ten adult implant recipients trained approximately 7 hours on psychophysical tasks (Gap-in-Noise Detection, Frequency Discrimination, Spectral Rippled Noise [SRN], Iterated Rippled Noise, Temporal Modulation). Speech performance was assessed before and after training using Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT) words in quiet and in eight-speaker babble. CAEPs evoked by a natural speech stimulus /baba/ with varying syllable stress were assessed pre-and posttraining, in quiet and in noise. SRN psychophysical thresholds showed a significant improvement (78% on average) over the training period, but performance on other psychophysical tasks did not change. LNT scores in noise improved significantly post-training by 11% on average compared with three pretraining baseline measures. N1P2 amplitude changed post-training for /baba/ in quiet (p ¼ 0.005, visit 3 pretraining versus visit 4 post-training). CAEP changes did not correlate with behavioral measures. CI recipients' clinical records indicated a plateau in speech perception performance prior to participation in the study. A short period of intensive psychophysical training produced small but significant gains in speech perception in noise and spectral discrimination ability. There
Highlights • Oscillatory responses in the theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands were suppressed whe... more Highlights • Oscillatory responses in the theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands were suppressed when listening in background noise. • Modulatory frequency shifts in the theta and alpha bands were different in children with listening problems. • In addition, frequency shifts in the beta and gamma bands were different in children with listening problems and auditory processing disorders. Oscillatory decoupling of auditory encoding, Gilley et al.
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2015
Background: An important goal of providing amplification to children with hearing loss is to ensu... more Background: An important goal of providing amplification to children with hearing loss is to ensure that hearing aids are adjusted to match targets of prescriptive procedures as closely as possible. The Desired Sensation Level (DSL) v5 and the National Acoustic Laboratories’ prescription for nonlinear hearing aids, version 1 (NAL-NL1) procedures are widely used in fitting hearing aids to children. Little is known about hearing aid fitting outcomes for children with severe or profound hearing loss. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the prescribed and measured gain of hearing aids fit according to the NAL-NL1 and the DSL v5 procedure for children with moderately severe to profound hearing loss; and to examine the impact of choice of prescription on predicted speech intelligibility and loudness. Research Design: Participants were fit with Phonak Naida V SP hearing aids according to the NAL-NL1 and DSL v5 procedures. The Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) and estimat...
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2014
Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing s... more Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing skills in children and adults. However, there is limited data available on the maturational effects on the performance on these tests. Purpose: The current study investigated maturational effects on auditory processing abilities using three psychophysical measures: temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF), iterated ripple noise (IRN) perception, and spectral ripple discrimination (SRD). Research Design: A cross-sectional study. Three groups of subjects were tested: 10 adults (18–30 yr), 10 older children (12–18 yr), and 10 young children (8–11 yr) Data Collection and Analysis: Temporal envelope processing was measured by obtaining thresholds for amplitude modulation detection as a function of modulation frequency (TMTF; 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 Hz). Temporal fine structure processing was measured using IRN, and spectral processing was measured using SRD. Results: The results showed t...
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2004
The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatc... more The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN), extracting MMN from the deviant and standard waveforms, and identifying the response in children and adults. Several stimulus types were compared (pure tones, chords, and natural speech tokens) to determine which optimally elicit MMN. Deviant-alone and flip-flop MMN extraction methods that control for stimulus effects on MMN were compared for the speech stimuli (/da/ and /ga/). Visual identification, an area criterion, and integral-distribution techniques were used to identify MMN. Eight adults (20 to 28 years) and eight children (8 to 12 years) participated in the study. The deviant-alone method elicited bigger MMN area and duration than the flip-flop method for the speech stimuli. An area criterion of 110 μV x msec identified 90% of visually identified MMN compared to 62% identified using the integral-distribution technique. For both children and adults, speech stim...
The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading di... more The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading disorders and a control group. Cortical responses (P1 and N250) to the sound /da / were measured at interstimulus intervals of 538, 1072 and 2152 ms. As expected, owing to slow neural recovery periods, both groups showed longer cortical response latencies at the shortest interstimulus interval of 538 ms. N250 showed a slower neural refractory period at the short interstimulus interval (538 ms) for children with reading disorders than the control group, however. Only control group children showed interhemispheric differences for the N250 peak. No group differences were evident for P1. The results suggest that children with reading disorders have different and slower underlying neural responses than typically developing children.
Electrophysiological measures that can be used to objectively evaluate binaural interaction in co... more Electrophysiological measures that can be used to objectively evaluate binaural interaction in cochlear implantees include the binaural interaction component (BIC) and an evoked potential analog of the dmasking-level differenceT (MLD). Results from normal listeners show that cortical auditory-evoked responses obtained using these methods can be used to measure binaural processing. Preliminary data from three sequentially implanted adults are presented.
A male with unilateral deafness in the right ear since 8 years of age developed a sudden hearing ... more A male with unilateral deafness in the right ear since 8 years of age developed a sudden hearing loss in the left ear at age 63. A hearing aid was fi tted in the left ear with limited benefi t. The right ear received a cochlear implant (CI) 20 months later. Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) and speech recognition scores (SRS) were measured in free-fi eld three, six and nine months after implantation with the hearing aid alone, CI alone and bimodal condition (hearing aid and CI together). Three months after implantation the cortical responses for the two ears were similar, despite more than 50 years of unilateral auditory deprivation. CAEPs measured over time show evidence of binaural interaction and improvements in SRS.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Audiology, 2005
... Correspondence and reprint requests: Alison King, Australian Hearing, Suite 14, Centro Whiteh... more ... Correspondence and reprint requests: Alison King, Australian Hearing, Suite 14, Centro Whitehorse, 17 Market Street, Box Hill, Vic, Australia 3128. E-mail: Alison.King@hearing.com. au Brief Communications Page 2. emissions and/or a cochlear microphonic. ...
Children clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APDs) are often described as ea... more Children clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APDs) are often described as easily distracted and inattentive, leading some researchers to propose that APDs might be a consequence of underlying attention difficulties or a subtype of attention disorders. The aim of this study was to investigate the link between AP and attention by determining the relationship between performance on an auditory and visual sustained attention task and performance on a common APD test battery. This study was a cross-sectional correlation study of school-aged children. Participants were a clinical group of 101 children considered by their parents or teachers to have listening difficulties, and a control group of 18 children with no suspected listening difficulties. All children were 7-12 yr old. All children passed a standard peripheral audiologic assessment and were assessed using a clinical APD test battery and reading accuracy, nonverbal intelligence, and visual and auditory continu...
It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing a... more It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing and cognitive abilities. Recent research has examined the relationship between musicians' advantage and implicit statistical learning skills. In the present study, we assessed a variety of auditory processing skills, cognitive processing skills, and statistical learning (auditory and visual forms) in age-matched musicians (N=17) and non-musicians (N=18). Musicians had significantly better performance than non-musicians on frequency discrimination, and backward digit span. A key finding was that musicians had better auditory, but not visual, statistical learning than non-musicians. Performance on the statistical learning tasks was not correlated with performance on auditory and cognitive measures. Musicians' superior performance on auditory (but not visual) statistical learning suggests that musical expertise is associated with an enhanced ability to detect statistical regularities in auditory stimuli.
Musicians' brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the struc... more Musicians' brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long-term musical training. In this study, we examined implicit extraction of statistical regularities from a continuous stream of stimuli-statistical learning (SL). We investigated whether long-term musical training is associated with better extraction of statistical cues in an auditory SL (aSL) task and a visual SL (vSL) task-both using the embedded triplet paradigm. Online measures, characterized by event related potentials (ERPs), were recorded during a familiarization phase while participants were exposed to a continuous stream of individually presented pure tones in the aSL task or individually presented cartoon figures in the vSL task. Unbeknown to participants, the stream was composed of triplets. Musicians showed advantages when compared to non-musicians in the online measure (early N1 and N400 triplet onset effects) during the aSL ta...
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Audiology, 2003
Although auditory brainstem response (ABR) audiometry is widely used to assess hearing sensitiv-i... more Although auditory brainstem response (ABR) audiometry is widely used to assess hearing sensitiv-ity in infants and young children, normal calibration values vary across clinics. This study was undertaken to determine normal hearing thresholds for tonebursts and clicks with ...
Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early ... more Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early and chronic otitis media (OM) which is difficult to treat and has lifelong impacts in health and education. The LiTTLe Program (Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn) aimed to increase infants' access to spoken language input, teach parents to manage health and hearing problems, and support children's school readiness. This paper aimed to explore caregivers' views about this inclusive, parent-implemented early childhood program for 0-3 years in an Aboriginal community health context. Data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 9 caregivers of 12 children who had participated in the program from one remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory are presented. Data were analysed thematically. Caregivers provided overall views on the program. In addition, three key areas of focus in the program are also presented here: speech and language, hearing health, and school...
Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of audi... more Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of auditory and cognitive processing in the research and clinical laboratories. There is currently no consensus on the choice of appropriate reference for auditory ERPs. The most commonly used references in auditory ERP research are the mathematically linked-mastoids (LM) and average referencing (AVG). Since LM and AVG referencing procedures do not solve the issue of electrically-neutral reference, Reference Electrode Standardization Technique (REST) was developed to create a neutral reference for EEG recordings. The aim of the current research is to compare the influence of the reference on amplitude and latency of auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) as a function of magnitude of frequency deviance across three commonly used electrode montages (16, 32, and 64-channel) using REST, LM, and AVG reference procedures. The current study was designed to determine if the three reference methods capture...
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2017
Classrooms can be noisy and are challenging listening environments for children with auditory pro... more Classrooms can be noisy and are challenging listening environments for children with auditory processing disorder (APD). This research was undertaken to determine if the Listening Inventory for Education-UK version (LIFE-UK) can differentiate children with listening difficulties and APD from their typically developing peers.To investigate reliability and validity of the student and teacher versions LIFE-UK questionnaire for assessing classroom listening difficulties.Cross-sectional quantitative study comparing children with listening difficulties with typically developing children.In total, 143 children (7–12 yr) participated; 45 were diagnosed with APD. Fifteen participants with reported listening difficulties who passed the APD test battery were assigned to a “listening difficulty” (LiD) group. Eighty three children from nine classrooms formed a Control group.Children and teachers completed the LIFE-UK questionnaire student and teacher versions. Factor analysis was undertaken, and...
This study investigated whether a short intensive psychophysical auditory training program is ass... more This study investigated whether a short intensive psychophysical auditory training program is associated with speech perception benefits and changes in cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) in adult cochlear implant (CI) users. Ten adult implant recipients trained approximately 7 hours on psychophysical tasks (Gap-in-Noise Detection, Frequency Discrimination, Spectral Rippled Noise [SRN], Iterated Rippled Noise, Temporal Modulation). Speech performance was assessed before and after training using Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT) words in quiet and in eight-speaker babble. CAEPs evoked by a natural speech stimulus /baba/ with varying syllable stress were assessed pre-and posttraining, in quiet and in noise. SRN psychophysical thresholds showed a significant improvement (78% on average) over the training period, but performance on other psychophysical tasks did not change. LNT scores in noise improved significantly post-training by 11% on average compared with three pretraining baseline measures. N1P2 amplitude changed post-training for /baba/ in quiet (p ¼ 0.005, visit 3 pretraining versus visit 4 post-training). CAEP changes did not correlate with behavioral measures. CI recipients' clinical records indicated a plateau in speech perception performance prior to participation in the study. A short period of intensive psychophysical training produced small but significant gains in speech perception in noise and spectral discrimination ability. There
Highlights • Oscillatory responses in the theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands were suppressed whe... more Highlights • Oscillatory responses in the theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands were suppressed when listening in background noise. • Modulatory frequency shifts in the theta and alpha bands were different in children with listening problems. • In addition, frequency shifts in the beta and gamma bands were different in children with listening problems and auditory processing disorders. Oscillatory decoupling of auditory encoding, Gilley et al.
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2015
Background: An important goal of providing amplification to children with hearing loss is to ensu... more Background: An important goal of providing amplification to children with hearing loss is to ensure that hearing aids are adjusted to match targets of prescriptive procedures as closely as possible. The Desired Sensation Level (DSL) v5 and the National Acoustic Laboratories’ prescription for nonlinear hearing aids, version 1 (NAL-NL1) procedures are widely used in fitting hearing aids to children. Little is known about hearing aid fitting outcomes for children with severe or profound hearing loss. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the prescribed and measured gain of hearing aids fit according to the NAL-NL1 and the DSL v5 procedure for children with moderately severe to profound hearing loss; and to examine the impact of choice of prescription on predicted speech intelligibility and loudness. Research Design: Participants were fit with Phonak Naida V SP hearing aids according to the NAL-NL1 and DSL v5 procedures. The Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) and estimat...
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2014
Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing s... more Background: There are many clinically available tests for the assessment of auditory processing skills in children and adults. However, there is limited data available on the maturational effects on the performance on these tests. Purpose: The current study investigated maturational effects on auditory processing abilities using three psychophysical measures: temporal modulation transfer function (TMTF), iterated ripple noise (IRN) perception, and spectral ripple discrimination (SRD). Research Design: A cross-sectional study. Three groups of subjects were tested: 10 adults (18–30 yr), 10 older children (12–18 yr), and 10 young children (8–11 yr) Data Collection and Analysis: Temporal envelope processing was measured by obtaining thresholds for amplitude modulation detection as a function of modulation frequency (TMTF; 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 Hz). Temporal fine structure processing was measured using IRN, and spectral processing was measured using SRD. Results: The results showed t...
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 2004
The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatc... more The overall aims of the study were to determine optimal methods and stimuli for eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN), extracting MMN from the deviant and standard waveforms, and identifying the response in children and adults. Several stimulus types were compared (pure tones, chords, and natural speech tokens) to determine which optimally elicit MMN. Deviant-alone and flip-flop MMN extraction methods that control for stimulus effects on MMN were compared for the speech stimuli (/da/ and /ga/). Visual identification, an area criterion, and integral-distribution techniques were used to identify MMN. Eight adults (20 to 28 years) and eight children (8 to 12 years) participated in the study. The deviant-alone method elicited bigger MMN area and duration than the flip-flop method for the speech stimuli. An area criterion of 110 μV x msec identified 90% of visually identified MMN compared to 62% identified using the integral-distribution technique. For both children and adults, speech stim...
The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading di... more The current study investigated neural refractory effects in children (8-12 years) with reading disorders and a control group. Cortical responses (P1 and N250) to the sound /da / were measured at interstimulus intervals of 538, 1072 and 2152 ms. As expected, owing to slow neural recovery periods, both groups showed longer cortical response latencies at the shortest interstimulus interval of 538 ms. N250 showed a slower neural refractory period at the short interstimulus interval (538 ms) for children with reading disorders than the control group, however. Only control group children showed interhemispheric differences for the N250 peak. No group differences were evident for P1. The results suggest that children with reading disorders have different and slower underlying neural responses than typically developing children.
Electrophysiological measures that can be used to objectively evaluate binaural interaction in co... more Electrophysiological measures that can be used to objectively evaluate binaural interaction in cochlear implantees include the binaural interaction component (BIC) and an evoked potential analog of the dmasking-level differenceT (MLD). Results from normal listeners show that cortical auditory-evoked responses obtained using these methods can be used to measure binaural processing. Preliminary data from three sequentially implanted adults are presented.
A male with unilateral deafness in the right ear since 8 years of age developed a sudden hearing ... more A male with unilateral deafness in the right ear since 8 years of age developed a sudden hearing loss in the left ear at age 63. A hearing aid was fi tted in the left ear with limited benefi t. The right ear received a cochlear implant (CI) 20 months later. Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) and speech recognition scores (SRS) were measured in free-fi eld three, six and nine months after implantation with the hearing aid alone, CI alone and bimodal condition (hearing aid and CI together). Three months after implantation the cortical responses for the two ears were similar, despite more than 50 years of unilateral auditory deprivation. CAEPs measured over time show evidence of binaural interaction and improvements in SRS.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Audiology, 2005
... Correspondence and reprint requests: Alison King, Australian Hearing, Suite 14, Centro Whiteh... more ... Correspondence and reprint requests: Alison King, Australian Hearing, Suite 14, Centro Whitehorse, 17 Market Street, Box Hill, Vic, Australia 3128. E-mail: Alison.King@hearing.com. au Brief Communications Page 2. emissions and/or a cochlear microphonic. ...
Children clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APDs) are often described as ea... more Children clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APDs) are often described as easily distracted and inattentive, leading some researchers to propose that APDs might be a consequence of underlying attention difficulties or a subtype of attention disorders. The aim of this study was to investigate the link between AP and attention by determining the relationship between performance on an auditory and visual sustained attention task and performance on a common APD test battery. This study was a cross-sectional correlation study of school-aged children. Participants were a clinical group of 101 children considered by their parents or teachers to have listening difficulties, and a control group of 18 children with no suspected listening difficulties. All children were 7-12 yr old. All children passed a standard peripheral audiologic assessment and were assessed using a clinical APD test battery and reading accuracy, nonverbal intelligence, and visual and auditory continu...
It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing a... more It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing and cognitive abilities. Recent research has examined the relationship between musicians' advantage and implicit statistical learning skills. In the present study, we assessed a variety of auditory processing skills, cognitive processing skills, and statistical learning (auditory and visual forms) in age-matched musicians (N=17) and non-musicians (N=18). Musicians had significantly better performance than non-musicians on frequency discrimination, and backward digit span. A key finding was that musicians had better auditory, but not visual, statistical learning than non-musicians. Performance on the statistical learning tasks was not correlated with performance on auditory and cognitive measures. Musicians' superior performance on auditory (but not visual) statistical learning suggests that musical expertise is associated with an enhanced ability to detect statistical regularities in auditory stimuli.
Musicians' brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the struc... more Musicians' brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long-term musical training. In this study, we examined implicit extraction of statistical regularities from a continuous stream of stimuli-statistical learning (SL). We investigated whether long-term musical training is associated with better extraction of statistical cues in an auditory SL (aSL) task and a visual SL (vSL) task-both using the embedded triplet paradigm. Online measures, characterized by event related potentials (ERPs), were recorded during a familiarization phase while participants were exposed to a continuous stream of individually presented pure tones in the aSL task or individually presented cartoon figures in the vSL task. Unbeknown to participants, the stream was composed of triplets. Musicians showed advantages when compared to non-musicians in the online measure (early N1 and N400 triplet onset effects) during the aSL ta...
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Audiology, 2003
Although auditory brainstem response (ABR) audiometry is widely used to assess hearing sensitiv-i... more Although auditory brainstem response (ABR) audiometry is widely used to assess hearing sensitiv-ity in infants and young children, normal calibration values vary across clinics. This study was undertaken to determine normal hearing thresholds for tonebursts and clicks with ...
Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early ... more Indigenous infants and children in Australia, especially in remote communities, experience early and chronic otitis media (OM) which is difficult to treat and has lifelong impacts in health and education. The LiTTLe Program (Learning to Talk, Talking to Learn) aimed to increase infants' access to spoken language input, teach parents to manage health and hearing problems, and support children's school readiness. This paper aimed to explore caregivers' views about this inclusive, parent-implemented early childhood program for 0-3 years in an Aboriginal community health context. Data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 9 caregivers of 12 children who had participated in the program from one remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory are presented. Data were analysed thematically. Caregivers provided overall views on the program. In addition, three key areas of focus in the program are also presented here: speech and language, hearing health, and school...
Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of audi... more Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have consistently been used in the investigation of auditory and cognitive processing in the research and clinical laboratories. There is currently no consensus on the choice of appropriate reference for auditory ERPs. The most commonly used references in auditory ERP research are the mathematically linked-mastoids (LM) and average referencing (AVG). Since LM and AVG referencing procedures do not solve the issue of electrically-neutral reference, Reference Electrode Standardization Technique (REST) was developed to create a neutral reference for EEG recordings. The aim of the current research is to compare the influence of the reference on amplitude and latency of auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) as a function of magnitude of frequency deviance across three commonly used electrode montages (16, 32, and 64-channel) using REST, LM, and AVG reference procedures. The current study was designed to determine if the three reference methods capture...
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