Contents
BSA Annual Conference Programme...4
Oral presentations...7
Symposium abstracts...14
From hair cells to hearing abstracts...14
PPC symposium Abstract...16
Special Interest Group Session Abstracts...18
Sponsor workshops...20
Oral Presentation Abstracts: Tuesday afternoon, 1400-1545...22
Oral Presentation Abstracts: Tuesday afternoon, 1615-1700...28
Oral Presentation Abstracts: Wednesday afternoon 1430-1600 (parallel session 1)...30
Oral Presentation Abstracts : Wednesday afternoon 1430-1600 (parallel session 2)...35
Poster Abstracts: General sensation and perception...42
Poster Abstracts: Hearing loss and hearing aids...72
Poster Abstracts: Cochlear implants...98
Poster Abstracts: Balance and vEMPs...107
BSA Annual Conference Programme Keele University
1
st– 3
rdSeptember 2014
Quick
guide: Keynotes Orals Exhibition Posters Clinical
workshops Special events
MONDAY 1st September
Time WESTMINSTER
THEATRE MEETING ROOM
1.098 EXHIBITION
SUITE POSTERS
10.00–11.00 Exhibitor set up Poster set up
11.00–12.00 BSA Council
meeting (90 min) Exhibitor set up
12.00 – 1.00 Lunch
13.00– 14.00 Introduction to conference Keynote I:
Prof Anne Schilder 14.00– 15.45 Symposium
From hair cells to hearing Sponsor Workshop
Oticon Exhibition Poster viewing
15.45–16.15 Refreshments
16.15–17.15 Symposium continued Sponsor wokshop Interacoustics 17.15–18.00 Twilight lecture : Prof
Trevor Cox (Author of Sonic
Wonderland)
Social event:
wine/nibbles + dinner
TUESDAY 2nd September
TIME WESTMINSTER
THEATRE MEETING ROOM
1.098 MEETING
ROOM 1.099
EXHIBITION
SUITE POSTERS
08.30–9.30 Keynote II:
Dr Stefan Launer
Exhibition refreshments
Poster viewing 09.30–10.30 BSA AGM (45
mins) 10.30–11.00 Professional
Practice Committee symposium
11.00-12.00 Sponsor workshop
Tinnitus Clinic
12.00– 13.00 New members
workshop Meeting with
sponsors Lunch
13.00–14.00 Keynote 3:
Prof T Ricketts
14.00–15.45 Oral presentations Sponsor workshop
GN Resound Discussion Forum
ARIG “Who defines Rehabilitation?”
Exhibition Poster viewing
15.45-16.15 Refreshments
16.15– 17.00 Oral presentations Forum
continued Exhibition 17.00–17.30 Action on
Hearing Loss presentation BSA Awards
Ceremony Poster prizes 19.30–23.00 Conference dinner
in Keele Hall
WEDNESDAY 3rd September
Session 4
TIME WESTMINSTER
THEATRE
LECTURE ROOM ONE (0.061)
MEETING ROOM 1.098
EXHIBITION SUITE
POSTERS 08.30– 9..30 UK Biobank
Update Exhibition
Refreshments Poster viewing 9.30 – 10.30 Innovation forum
10.30–11.15 APD Update Journal club
Adult Hearing Screening
Exhibition closes
11.15- 12.30 BIG Update
12.30– 13.30 Future plans for the Annual Conference
Electrophysiology SIG
Lunch
13.30–14.30 Ted Evans Lecture Prof Corne Kros 14.30– 16.00 Oral presentations
(basic science) Oral presentations (clinical/translational)
End of meeting
BSA Annual Conference 2014
Oral presentations Monday 1st September
Westminster Theatre
13.00. Opening Keynote I: Scientific evidence within the clinical context Prof. Anne Schilder, University College London.
14. 00. Symposium: From Hair Cells to Hearing
14.00. The sensory hair cell in normal hearing and disease Prof. Dave Furness, Keele University
14.35. Coding of acoustic information in the auditory pathway
Prof. Alan Palmer, MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham.
15.10. Integrating acoustic and electric information following cochlear implantation Dr. Padraig Kitterick, NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit.
15.45 Break
16.15. Listening difficulties and auditory processing disorder (APD) in children: proposed mechanisms
Prof. David Moore, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, USA.
17.15. The Twilight Lecture: The Acoustics Behind Sonic Wonderland Prof. Trevor Cox Salford University, Manchester.
18.00 Social event – wine and nibbles
Room 1.098
14.00. Sponsor Workshop – Oticon (Alison Stone)
14:00 – 14:30 Evidence for a new compression strategy for children 14:45 – 15:15 New clinical tools for paediatric fittings
15:25 – 15:45 Connectivity for Kids
16.15 PM: Sponsor Workshop Interacoustics
Tuesday 2
ndSeptember, morning Westminster Theatre
8.30. Keynote II: Hearing Systems in a connected world.
Dr Stefan Launer, Phonak, Zurich, Switzerland
9.30. BSA AGM
10.30. Professional Practice Committee Symposium – How you can make audiology better 10.30. Introduction
Graham Frost, PPC Vice Chair
10.35. What PPC is doing to make audiology better Dr Daniel Rowan, ISVR, Southampton University.
11.00. The impact of NICE accreditation
Deborah Collis, Associate Director, Accreditation and Quality Assurance, NICE 11.30. PPC docuemts: What, How, When? It’s your turn.
Dr Sebastian Hendricks, Barnet & Chase Farm Hospitals and the RNTNEH 11.55 Summary
Graham Frost.
12.00 – 13.00. Lunch
Room 1.098
11.00. Spomsor Workshop – Timmitus Clinic
Tinnitus pathophysiology and evolving clinical options for therapy.
Mark Williams:
12.00 – 13.00. New/young members workshop
Tuesday 2
ndSeptember, afternooon Westminster Theatre
13.00. Keynote III: Speech recognition and spatialisation in complex listening environments:
effects of hearing aids and processing
Prof. Todd Rickets Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology, Nashville, USA
Oral Presentations
14.00 – 14.15. L.F. Halliday, O. Tuomainen, and S. Rosen. Auditory processing deficits in children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss (Listening problems with hearing loss)
14.15 – 14.30. J.G. Barry, D. Tomlin, D.R. Moore and H. Dillon. Assessing the role of parental report (ECLiPS) in supporting assessment of children referred for auditory processing disorder
14.30 – 14.45. E. Holmes, P.T. Kitterick and A.Q. Summerfield. Do children with hearing loss show atypical attention during ‘cocktail party’ listening?
14.45 – 15.00. S.A. Flanagan and U. Goswami. Temporal asymmetry and loudness : amplitude envelope sensitivity in developmental dyslexia
15.00 – 15.15. L.Zhang, P.Jennings and F. Schlaghecken.Learning to ignore background noise in VCV test
15.15 – 15.30. A. Sarampalis, D. Alfandari, J.H. Gmelin, M.F. Lohden, A.F. Pietrus-Rajman and D.
Başkent. Cognitive listening fatigue with degraded speech
15.30 - 15.45. D. Kunke, M. J. Henry, R. Hannemann, M. Serman and J. Obleser. A link between auditory attention and self perceived communication success in older listeners
Break
16.15 – 16.30. Brian C.J. Moore and Sara M.K. Madsen. Preliminary results of a survey of experiences in listening to music via hearing aids
16.30 – 16.45. J. L. Verhe* and J. Hots. Mid-bandwidth loudness depression in hearing-impaired listeners
16.45 – 17.00. A. King, K. Hopkins and C. J. Plack. The effects of age and hearing loss on neural synchrony and interaural phase difference discrimination
17.00 - 17.10. Action on Hearing Loss presentation.
BSA Awards Ceremony and Poster Prizes
Meeting Room 1.098
14.00. Sponsor Workshop – GN Resound.
Paul Leeming, Support Audiologist
Meeting Room 1.099
14.00. BSA ARIG Discussion forum on patient-centred care: “Who defines rehabilitation?”
(i) shared decision making
(ii) facilitating change through developing self-efficacy (iii) outcome measures for clinicians and researchers Led by Amanda Casey, Dr. Helen Pryce and Dr. Mel Ferguson
19.30-23.00. Conference dinner in Keele Hall
Wednesday 3rd September, morning Westminster Theatre
8.30-9.30. Large scale hearing studies using the UK Biobank resource Introduction to UK Biobank session
Prof. Kevin Munro, University of Manchester.
Hearing in middle age: a population snapshot Prof. Kevin J Munro.
Cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and hearing Dr. Piers Dawes, University of Manchester.
Speech in noise hearing, pure tone threshold and cognition
Prof. David Moore, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, USA.
Hearing loss and cognitive decline: the role of hearing aids, social isolation and depression Dr. Piers Dawes
Concluding comments Dr. Piers Dawes
9.30 – 10.30. Innovation forum
12.30 Discussion on the future plans for the Annual Conference (open to all)
Lecture theatre 01
10.30-11.15. BSA Auditory Processing Disorder SIG update: Onwards and Upwards
Dr Nicci Campbell, ISVR, University of Southampton, and Prof Dave Moore, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, USA.
11.15-12.00. BSA Balance Interest Group update
The Video Head Impulse Test and its relationship to caloric testing Dr Steven Bell, Hearing and Balance Centre, University of Southampton.
Motivational approach to behaviour change in vestibular rehabilitation to improve clinic attendance
Dr Nicola Topass, Audiology Department, Royal Surrey County Hospital.
Room 1.098
10.30-12.30 BSA Journal Club: Adult Hearing Screening Led by Dr Cherilee Rutherford, Dr Lorraine Gailley, John Day 12.30 – 13.20. Electrophysiology SIG meeting
12.30 Lunch
Wednesday 3rd September, afternoon Westminster Theatre
13.30. Keynote IV: Ted Evans Lecture. Adventures in mammalian mechanotransduction:
adaptation, aminoglycosides and anomalous currents. Prof. Corné Kros, University of Sussex.
Oral Presentations
Parallel session 1
14.30 – 14.45. B. Coomber, V.L. Kowalkowski, J.I. Berger, A.R. Palmer and M.N. Wallace.
Changes in nitric oxide synthase in the cochlear nucleus following unilateral acoustic trauma 14.45 – 15.00. M. Sayles and M. G. Heinz. Amplitude-modulation detection and discrimination in the chinchilla ventral cochlear nucleus following noise-induced hearing loss
15.00 – 15.15. L.D. Orton and A. Rees. Commissural improvement of sound level sensitivity and discriminability in the inferior colliculi
15.15 – 15.30. S.M. Town, K. C. Wood, H. Atilgan, G. P. Jones and J. K. Bizley. Probing the physiology of perception: Invariant neural responses in ferret auditory cortex during vowel discrimination
15.30 – 15.45. R.P, Carlyon, J.M. Deeks, A.J. Billig and J.A. Bierer. Across-electrode variation in gap-detection and stimulus-detection thresholds for cochlear implant users
, § MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK ,‡ University of Washington, Seattle, W.A, U.S.A.
15.45 – 16.00. N.P.Todd and C.S. Lee. Source analyses of vestibular evoked potentials (VsEPs) activated during rhythm perception
Lecture theatre 1
Parallel session 2
14.30 – 14.45. E. Heffernan, N. Coulson, H. Henshaw and M. Ferguson. The psychosocial experiences of individuals with hearing loss
14.45 – 15.00. S.E.I. Aboagye*, M.A. Ferguson§, N. Coulson‡, J. Birchall§‡ and J.G. Barry*, “You’re not going to make me wear hearing aids are you?” Factors affecting adolescent’s uptake and adherence to aural habilitation
15.00 – 15.15. S. Dasgupta, S.Raghavan, M.O’Hare and L.Marl. X linked gusher syndrome – a rare cause for hearing loss in children
15.15 – 15.30. S.Wadsworth, H. Fortnum,, A. McCormack and I. Mulla.. What encourages or discourages hearing-impaired children to take part in sport?
15.30 15.45. G. Al-Malky , M. De Jongh, M.Kikic, S.J.Dawson and R.Suri. Assessment of current provision for auditory ototoxicity monitoring in the UK
15.45 – 16.00. D. Hewitt. Everything an Audiologist needs to know about speech in noise
16.00. Conference Close
Keynote speakers
Biographies and talk information
Professor Anne Schilder, ENT surgeon and NIHR Research Professor, leads the evidENT team at UCL dedicated to developing high quality clinical research and promote evidence based management of ENT, Hearing and Balance conditions,. She is professor of Paediatric ENT at UCL's Ear Institute, Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital and University Medical Centre Utrecht, as well as Visiting Professor at Oxford University. She is an expert in clinical trials; her RCTs in the field of upper airway infections in children have
influenced how global health-care systems think about the management of these conditions and have been translated in evidence-based guidelines and health policies. Her evidENT team brings together clinicians and researchers across the UK. evidENt works with patients, charities, industry and nother stakeholders to ensure patients benefit from new and better treatments and to learn how to improve ENT, Hearing and Balance services for the future. Her talk is entitled: Scientific evidence within the clinical context.
Trevor Cox is Professor of Acoustic Engineering at Salford University where he is a researcher and teacher in acoustics, signal processing and perception, and renowned for his media work, documentaries and communicating to the general population as well as to students. He has won prestigious awards from the Institute of Acoustics of which he is a former President. He has written many books, including Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound and a substantial body of scientific literature and research articles. His talk is entitled:
The Acoustics Behind Sonic Wonderland
Sonic Wonderland is a popular science book about the most remarkable sounds in the world. This talk will look at some of the detailed acoustic science behind a few of the wonders, picking examples that required first hand research in preparing the book. It will include solving the mystery of Echo Bridge, something that first appeared in the Journal of Acoustical Society of America in the 1940s.
The talk will include measurements on the badly tuned musical road in California. To finish, the talk will outline a search for places with excessive reverberation time. This will include the vast oil tank in Scotland where Trevor broke the Guinness World Record for the longest 'longest echo'. The author returned to the tank this spring to play the saxophone, and he will reveal what it is like to play in a space with a reverberation time of 75 seconds.
Stefan Launer has been Vice President Science & Technology of Sonova since April 2008 and joined the Management Board in April 2013. He started his professional career at Phonak in 1995 in the Research and Development department where he held various functions. Today he is in charge of managing the basic science and technology programs in various fields of hearing health care, the development of core technologies and intellectual property rights.
Stefan Launer studied Physics at the University of Würzburg and in 1995 was awarded a PhD from the University of Oldenburg on modeling auditory perception in hearing impaired subjects. His talk is entitled:
Hearing Systems in a connected world.
Over the last two decades hearing instruments have turned into intelligent systems offering a range of
different algorithms for addressing listening needs in specific acoustic environments. More recently modern hearing systems are becoming wirelessly connected to each other to form body area networks. These ear to ear connections allow applying new features such as binaural signal processing techniques to improve communication in complex listening conditions. A second class of applications allows connecting hearing systems to external audio sources such as phones, remote microphones, TV, audio players etc. Today ear to ear wireless links allow to apply binaural signal processing mimicking the way the auditory system processes sounds binaurally. These algorithms can offer significant benefit in various difficult listening conditions beyond the performance of classical noise reduction and directional microphone systems. The second class of systems is particularly designed to improve communication over larger distances eg school environments. A third set of applications of wireless connectivity is to offer new approaches to service delivery and new fitting approaches to hearing impaired people. In this talk I want to present the state of the art of hearing instrument technology and discuss future perspectives of the new technology trends.
Todd A. Ricketts, Ph.D, CCC-A, FAAA, is an associate professor and the Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences; and, Director of the Dan Maddox Hearing Aid Research Laboratory.
Todd has published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. To date he has presented over 300 scholarly papers, poster presentations, short courses, mini-seminars, and workshops both nationally and internationally. He continues to pursue a federally and industry funded program studying various aspects of hearing, hearing aids and cochlear implants. He was named a Fellow of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association in 2006 and his article "Directional benefit in simulated classroom environments" received the Editors award from the American Journal of Audiology at the 2008 AHSA convention. He also is a past editor-in-chief of the quarterly journal Trends in Amplification, a current associate editor for the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research and the past chair of the Vanderbilt Institutional Review Board. His talk is entitled: Speech recognition and spatialisation in complex listening environments: effects of hearing aids and processing.
Corné Kros is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Noted for his seminal studies of cochlear hair cell physiology, in particular the properties of spontaneous activity in pre-hearing inner hair cells and the process of mechanoelectrical transduction by which these cells detect sound, Professor Kros's research is at the forefront of basic science in hearing. His current interests lie in the effects of aminoglycoside antibiotics on hearing, and the development of blocking agents that might prevent aminoglycoside-induced damage to the hair cells. His talk is entitled:
Adventures in mammalian mechanotransduction: adaptation, aminoglycosides and anomalous currents
C.J. Kros*§, *Sussex Neuroscience, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK,
§ENT Department, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Hearing requires sound being transduced into electrical signals in the brain. The key step in this mechano-electrical transduction (MET) occurs in about a hundred ion channels atop each of the auditory hair cells in the cochlea (Kros et al, 1992). Gated by tip links between adjacent stereocilia in the hair bundles these MET channels, when open, allow current flow from the endolymph into the hair cells, depolarizing them. Just two degrees of hair bundle deflection open 90% of the channels
(Géléoc et al, 1997) to encode the loudest sounds. An adaptation process dependent on influx of Ca2+
ions through the MET channels keeps the hair cells optimally sensitive to small changes in sound intensity, and has been extensively studied in hair cells from lower vertebrates. Recent evidence suggests that in mammalian auditory hair cells adaptation is similarly Ca2+ dependent and rapid, with Ca2+ acting at or near the MET channel itself (Corns, Johnson, Kros & Marcotti, in preparation).
The unusual characteristics of ion permeation through the MET channels, favouring the entry of Ca2+ ions by a vestibule at the extracellular side of the pore, also makes the cells vulnerable to ototoxic damage by aminoglycoside antibiotics such as gentamicin and dihydrostreptomycin. The aminoglycosides enter hair cells through the MET channels and are effectively trapped once inside (Marcotti et al, 2005). We are currently screening for compounds that compete with the aminoglycosides for entry into the hair cells, as a potential means to reduce the ototoxicity of these otherwise clinically useful drugs.
Heretically, MET currents with unusual properties can be found under a variety of conditions in which tip links are absent (Marcotti et al, 2014). These large currents occur predominantly in response to stimuli of the opposite polarity to those that generate normal MET currents and have slower kinetics. The underlying ion channels appear to lack the vestibule of the normal MET channels and may be MET channel precursors situated at the base of the stereocilia.
Acknowledgements
Work in the Kros lab is supported by the MRC.
References
Géléoc G.S.G., Lennan G.W., Richardson G.P. & Kros C.J. 1997. A quantitative comparison of mechanoelectrical transduction in vestibular and auditory hair cells of neonatal mice. Proc Biol Sci, 264, 611-621.
Kros C.J., Rüsch A. & Richardson G.P. 1992. Mechano-electrical transducer currents in hair cells of the cultured neonatal mouse cochlea. Proc Biol Sci, 249, 185-193.
Marcotti W., van Netten S.M. & Kros C.J. 2005. The aminoglycoside antibiotic dihydrostreptomycin rapidly enters hair cells through the mechano-electrical transducer channels. J Physiol, 567, 505-521.
Marcotti W., Corns L.F., Desmonds T., Kirkwood N.K., Richardson G.P. & Kros C.J. 2014.
Transduction without tip links in cochlear hair cells is mediated by ion channels with permeation properties distinct from those of the mechano-electrical transducer channel. J Neurosci, 34, 5505-5514.
Symposium abstracts
From hair cells to hearing abstracts The sensory hair cell in normal hearing and disease
D.N. Furness. Institute for science and technology in hearing, Keele University.
Hair cells are the sensory receptor of our hearing and balance systems. Their ability to detect mechanical stimuli caused by sound and head movements is based on a structure at their tops called the hair bundle, composed of a precisely organised array of minute hairs (called stereocilia). This bunde, as well as being physically highly sensitive, for istanve to high impact sounds or certin drugs, is the target of a number of genetic abnormalities which underlie conditions such as Usher syndrome and other hearing impairments. One of the prinicpal targets in Usher syndrome is the tip link, a structure found within the hair bundle that is composed of dimers of two molecules, cadherin
23 and protocadherin 15. Another common hearing impairment is associated with one of the candidate proteins for the hair-cell transducer channels, TMC1. Mouse mutations in these proteins have revealed much about how defects in them cause hearing loss by targeting the hair bundle and affecting both its structure and its ability to detect mechanical stimuli.
Coding of acoustic information in the auditory pathway
Professor Alan R. Palmer, Director, MRC Institute of Hearing Research, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
As a result of the mechanical action of the basilar membrane and transduction in the cochlear hair cells, responses of auditory nerve fibres are tuned like a series of overlapping band pass filters allowing a good representation of the frequency content of any sound, which becomes less clear at high levels as the filters broaden. Activity in the auditory nerve signals the frequency content, the timing and the sound level of the sounds. Pathways from the first brainstem nucleus (the cochlear nucleus) converge in the brainstem to allow combination of information from the two ears for analysis of the location of the sound source, which is then sent to the auditory midbrain. Pathways from the cochlear nucleus also send information about the sound spectrum and its pitch directly to the auditory midbrain where it is integrated with inputs from all lower brainstem nuclei, before sending the information on to the auditory cortex via the thalamus. The auditory cortex has several frequency mapped areas which process sounds in parallel. There is some evidence for processing of different aspects of sounds in different cortical areas, giving rise to suggestions of different anatomical and functional processing streams for different aspects of sound perception. The deeper layers of the cortex send projections back down the auditory pathway enabling the cortex to modulate the ascending flow of auditory information.
Integrating acoustic and electric information following cochlear implantation P.T. Kitterick. NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham, UK
A cochlear implant evokes neural activity in the auditory nerve by delivering a train of electric pulses into the cochlea via a micro-electrode array. The amplitude of the pulses at each electrode is modulated by an externally-worn speech processor to encode the temporal envelope of sound energy within a particular frequency band. A unilateral cochlear implant provides sufficient temporal and spectoral information to support speech understanding at favourable signal-to-noise ratios, and bilateral cochlear implants provide access to inter-aural level cues which can support sound source localisation.
Traditional candidates for cochlear implantation in the UK have a bilateral profound hearing loss. Thus, their listening abilities following implantation primarily reflect access to the electric signals from the implant. However, some UK recipients may have access to residual acoustic hearing at low frequencies, and recipients in other healthcare systems are being implanted with increasing levels of residual acoustic hearing in the non-implanted ear.
While patients with well-preserved access to residual acoustic hearing report subjective differences in quality between the electric and acoustic signals, benefits arising from simultaneous access to both signal modalities have been demonstrated using tests of speech perception and localisation. Vocoder studies with normal-hearing listeners suggest that additional benefit may be obtained if electric and acoustic information is delivered to neural populations with similar characteristic frequencies in each ear.
Acknowledgements
Supported by infrastructure funding from the National Institute for Health Research.
Listening difficulties and auditory processing disorder (APD) in children: proposed mechanisms
D.R. Moore* * Communication Sciences Research Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Department of Otolaryngology, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA; § School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
Developmental APD is sometimes diagnosed for children presenting with listening difficulties (LiD), but normal audiograms, who score poorly on tests mostly of speech perception. However, most children with LiD, whether or not diagnosed APD, have difficulties with cognitive functions, also associated with other learning disorders. Here, I discuss two possible mechanisms underlying LiD/APD in children (see also Moore, 2014), first, that some children have ‘suprathreshold’ hearing loss, and second, that cognitive insufficiency may be modelled by dichotic listening. A link with cochlear deficiencies is suggested by (i) impaired temporal perception (e.g. frequency discrimination), which may indicate impaired phase locking in the brainstem, (ii) peripheral processing abnormalities (e.g. acoustic reflexes, MOC inhibition), found in some children with LiD, (iii) children with auditory neuropathy, without hearing loss, can also have LiD/APD. Dichotic listening, used frequently to diagnose APD, is also used in cognitive neuroscience to study executive function, strongly and specifically implicated in LiD/APD. By comparing the ‘free recall’
of dichotic CV syllables with ‘forced attention’ to right or left ear, Hugdahl (2009) has discovered a fronto-parietal network involved in top-down attention regulation of bottom-up auditory processing in individuals with learning disorders. We are currently examining this network in children with LiD/APD.
References
Hugdahl K, Westerhausen R, Alho K, Medvedev S, Laine M, & Hämäläinen H. (2009).
Attention and cognitive control: unfolding the dichotic listening story. Scand J Psychol, 50,11-22.
Moore, D.R. 2014. Sources of pathology underlying listening disorders in children. Int J Psychophysiol. in press.
PPC symposium Abstract
HOW YOU CAN MAKE AUDIOLOGY BETTER.
A symposium by the BSA Professional Practice Committee.
You, the audiological professional, are fundamental to the development of best clinical practice within the UK and you have an obligation to ensure that others in both your and allied professions benefit from your knowledge, experience and ideas. Whether a student, recently qualified or are following a career in audiology, you can make a significant contribution to making audiology better.
The principle aim of the BSA is the advancement of Audiology. This not only includes the scientific study of hearing and balance function and other related sciences, but also, as importantly, the advancement of best clinical practice in the diagnosis, management and rehabilitation of hearing and balance and allied disorders.
The development and promotion of good clinical Audiological practice at all stages of care by the BSA is facilitated by its Professional Practice Committee which provides and disseminates guidance on good practice which is demonstrably high on relevance, quality and impact. This guidance is achieved through the provision of recommended procedures, guidelines, minimum training standards and training days.
As part of the ongoing process to optimise the impact of the BSA, the PPC is in the process of submitting an application to NICE for accreditation of its guidance. This symposium will include a presentation by Deborah Collis, Associate Director of Accreditation and Quality Assurance for NICE, who will be speaking about the accreditation process and its potential benefits.
This symposium will demonstrate the key role that you should be playing in the development and promotion of good Audiological practice and discuss how this may best be achieved in order to have greatest impact. This will include exploring ways by which you can effectively engage in and contribute to the process of making audiology better.
UK Biobank symposium abstract
Large scale hearing studies using the UK Biobank resource
P. Dawes1, H. Fortnum2, D.R. Moore2,3, R. Emsley4, P. Norman5, K. Cruickshanks6, A.C. Davis7, M.
Edmondson-Jones2, A. McCormack2, Robert Pierzicki2 and K.J. Munro1,9
,1 School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, UK, 2 NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham, UK, 3Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, USA, 4Centre for Biostatistics, Institute of Population Health, University of Manchester, UK, 5 School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK, 6 Population Health Sciences and Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, USA, 9Central Manchester Universities Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK
The UK Biobank is a large data set established for investigations of the genetic, environmental and lifestyle causes of diseases of middle and older age. Over the course of 2006-2010, 503,325 UK adults between the ages of 40 to 69 years were recruited. Participants responded to questionnaire measures of lifestyle and demographic factors, performed a range of physical measures and donated biological samples. A subset of 164,770 participants completed a hearing test (the Digit Triplet Test, a measure of speech recognition in noise). During 2012 to 2013, 17,819 participants completed a repeat assessment, including 4,425 participants who completed the hearing test at both time points.
A multi-disciplinary team including researchers from Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, Cincinnati and Wisconsin have been collaborating to analyse hearing and tinnitus data from the UK Biobank. In this symposium, we report the first analyses, including i) an overview of patterns of hearing impairment and hearing aid use, ii) cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption as risks for hearing loss, iii) relationships between speech recognition in noise, audiometric thresholds and cognitive performance and iv) how associations between cognitive performance and hearing loss may be mediated by hearing aid use and social isolation.
Acknowledgements
This research was based on data provided by UK Biobank. Additional support was provided by the National Institute of Health Research (Nottingham Hearing BRU and Manchester BRC), the Medical Research Council, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. DRM was supported by the Intramural Programme of the Medical Research Council [Grant U135097130]. KJC was supported by R37AG11099, R01AG021917 and an Unrestricted Grant from Research to Prevent Blindness.
The Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit is funded by the National Institute for Health Research. This paper presents independent research funded in part by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health. This research was facilitated by Manchester Biomedical Research Centre. This research was conducted using the UK Biobank resource.
Special Interest Group Session Abstracts
APD
BSA Auditory Processing Disorder SIG update: Onwards and Upwards
N.G. Campbell* and D.R. Moore§, *Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, UK, §Communication Sciences Research Center, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Cincinnati, USA
Over the past 3 years the SIG has shaped international thinking. We published a peer-reviewed Position Statement and Practice Guidance Document (2011), and an ‘APD White Paper’ (2013) in the International Journal of Audiology. We initiated and collaborated with the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) to present very successful global APD days as part of the AAA conferences in Boston (2012) and in Orlando (2014). Since 2011, and our call for evidence based practice, there has been a surge in the number of randomised control studies. Finally, we hosted an APD Satellite Day at the 2013 BSA Annual Conference. This presentation reviews those past achievements and new and future developments in tests, resources and technology, and our new APD Position Statement and Practice Guidance Document. In our revised approach, the parcellation into Developmental, Acquired and Secondary APD, which has proven useful and popular, is retained.
For Developmental APD, we emphasize the goal of management of children, with a more hierarchical approach to testing and diagnosis. Assessment starts with questionnaires, followed by testing; where-after individuals are guided towards various interventions that suit their specific needs. Theoretic underpinnings become more biological and, therefore, testable, preventable or treatable.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the anonymous reviewers, members of the BSA Professional Practice Committee and all that took part in the public consultation for the Position Statement and Practice Guidance Document. We further acknowledge the commentaries of the leading international researchers that formed part of the BSA ‘APD White Paper’.
References
Moore D.R., Rosen S., Bamiou D., Campbell N.G. & Sirimanna T. (2013). Evolving Concepts of Developmental Auditory Processing Disorder (APD): A British Society of Audiology APD Special Interest Group ‘White Paper’. IJA, 1-11.
BSA APD SIG Steering Committee: Moore D.R., Alles R., Bamiou D., Batchelor L., Campbell N.G., Canning D., Grant P., Luxon L., Murray P., Nairn S., Rosen S., Sirimanna T., Treharne D. and Wakeham, K. (2011). BSA Position Statement: APD.
http://www.thebsa.org.uk/resources/apd-position-statement/
BSA APD SIG Steering Committee: Campbell N.G., Alles R., Bamiou D., Batchelor L., Canning D., Grant P., Luxon L., Moore D.R., Murray P., Nairn S., Rosen S., Sirimanna T., Treharne D.
and Wakeham, K. (2011). BSA Practice Guidance: An Overview of Current Management of APD.http://www.thebsa.org.uk/resources/overview-current-management-auditory-processing- disorder-apd/
BIG
The Video Head Impulse Test and its relationship to caloric testing
SL. Bell*, F. Barker, §, E.Mackenzie*, H.Hesleton*., C.Parker*, A.Sanderson*, *Hearing and Balance Centre, University of Southampton UK, § Windsor ENT, Berkshire
The subjective Head Impulse Test (HIT) (Halmagyi and Curthoys, 1988) was proposed to indicate the status of the vestibular occular reflex (VOR) at high frequencies. It relies on direct observation of the eyes whilst rapid short duration impulses are applied to the subject’s head. The presence of overt saccades are an indirect indication of peripheral abnormality in the canal being stimulated.
The Head Impulse Test tests the VOR at higher frequencies than the caloric test (Jorns-Haderli et al., 2007). However it relies on the detection of overt saccades by the observer. The video Head Impulse Test (vHIT) MacDougall et al. (2009) has been developed as an alternative system suitable for routine clinical use to make head impulse testing more objective. The system consists of software and lightweight goggles containing both an eye position camera that can track the subject's pupils, and a gyroscope that can track the angular movement of the head. The system records head impulse velocity, together with eye movement velocity in response to high velocity impulses that are applied to the head by the clinician. Impulses can be applied in the three planes of the semicircular canals. During this test the head is moved with acceleration that should be sufficient to cause the afferents of the semicircular canal on one side to be completely inhibited. Hence a semicircular canal on one side can be tested in effective isolation from the same canal on the other side
This study has two aims: To explore normative ranges for vHIT gain and to compare the results of vHIT testing with calorics in a sample of patients attending a clinic for balance disorder. Two normative studies were conducted to explore the normal ranges of vHIT gain in different semicircular canals. A clinical sample of 51 patients (20 male, 31 female) were tested with both lateral canal vHIT and air calorics.
Normative studies found that vHIT gain is near unity for lateral canals, but is significantly raised in the vertical canals. Care must be taken to avoid artefacts when recording from the vertical canals.
vHIT gain appears relatively insensitive to peripheral vestibular disorder as indicated by caloric testing, with low sensisivity but fair specificity. vHIT gain is abnormal in canals with no measurable function. The vHIT does not appear well suited to screen and identify patients who require caloric testing although the test may give complementary information to caloric testing.
Declaration of interest
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the presentation.
References
Halmagyi GM, Curthoys IS. (1988) A clinical sign of canal paresis. Arch Neurol. ; 45(7): 737-9.
Jorns-Haderli, M., Straumann, D. and Palla, A. (2007) Accuracy of the bedside head impulse test in detecting vestibular hypofunction, J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry, 78, 1113-1118.
MacDougall, H. G., Weber, K. P., McGarvie, L. A., Halmagyi, G. M. and Curthoys, I. S. (2009) The video head impulse test- diagnostic accuracy in peripheral vestibulopathy, Neurology, 73, 1134-1141..
Motivational approach to behaviour change in vestibular rehabilitation to improve clinic attendance
N. Topass, Audiology Department, Royal Surrey County Hospital, UK
This study aims to compare how the use of a motivational approach to behaviour change would improve patient clinic attendance and thus therapy adherence. Vestibular rehabilitation is the recommend primary treatment for stable vestibular lesions (Shepard et al, 1995). The prognosis for uncompensated peripheral vestibular lesions is generally very good with the percentage of patients
who dramatically or completely improve set at 90% (Shepard et al, 1995). Adherence to vestibular rehabilitation programs can however prove to be difficult as is the case in many chronic health conditions.
An important part of learning a new behaviour is for the patient to identify and acknowledge the value of the new behaviour (Konle-Parker, 2001). Motivational interviewing is a counselling technique which has been developed to help a patient to explore and resolve ambivalence related to behaviour change (Emmons & Rollnick, 2001).
A review of our clinic attendance was compiled to determine the efficacy of the customised vestibular rehabilitation program. The data was reviewed in terms of: attendance, did not
attends(DNAs); and cancellation history for the six month period from September 2012 to February 2013. The percentage of DNA’s was 12.6% and the late cancellation rate was 15.4% (A late
cancellation is made within 1 week of the appointment). A review of current literature revealed that patient motivation may be a key element to the high DNA rate for this particular speciality, thus a motivational approach to the patient pathway was introduced. The patient would then ‘opt in’ or
‘opt out’ of the therapy. The therapy program also included elements referred to as the ‘box’, the
‘line’ and the ‘circle’.
The results of the change in protocol was assess for the period from September 2013 to February 2014. The percentage of DNA’s was then 4.7% and the patient late appointment cancellation rate was 4.7%. The conclusion is thus that a motivational approach to vestibular rehabilitation delivery can improve clinic adherence and thus patient adherence to therapy.
Acknowledgements
Supported by Community Health Psychology, Farnham Road Hospital, UK.
References
Emmons K. & Rollnick S. 2001. Motivational interviewing in health care settings opportunities and limitations. Am J Prevent Med, 20(1), 68-74.
Konkle-Parker D.J. 2001. A motivational intervention to improve adherence to treatment of chronic disease, J Am Acad Nurse Pract, 13(2), 61-68.
Shepard N., Telian S., & Michigan A. A. (1995). Programmatic vestibular rehabilitation.
Otolaryngol-Head Neck Surg , 112, 173-182.
Tønnesen H. 2012. Engage in the process of change: Facts and methods, WHO-CC Clinical Health Promotion Center Bispebjerg University Hospital Copenhagen, Denmark Health Sciences Lund University, Sweden
Sponsor workshops
Monday 1st September at 2 PM: Oticon (Alison Stone)
14:00 – 14:30 Evidence for a new compression strategy for children 14:45 – 15:15 New clinical tools for paediatric fittings
15:25 – 15:45 Connectivity for Kids
Monday 1st September at 4.15 PM: Interacoustics Title TBA
Tuesday 2nd September at 11 AM: The Tinnitus Clinic
Mark Williams: Tinnitus Pathophysiology and Evolving Clinical Options for Therapy.
The investigation of tinnitus neural correlates within mammals has enabled the development of novel therapeutic approaches that strive to reduce or reverse pathological central changes in humans afflicted with bothersome auditory hallucinations. This talk will review the pathophysiology of subjective tinnitus and introduce evolving therapeutic intervention options.
Tuesday 2nd September at 2 PM : GN Resound Paul Leeming, Support Audiologist
Oral Presentation Abstracts: Tuesday afternoon, 1400-1545
Auditory processing deficits in children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss (Listening problems with hearing loss)
L. F. Halliday, O. Tuomainen, and S. Rosen, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, UK
Impaired auditory processing has been proposed as a primary deficit in developmental disorders of language, including dyslexia and specific language impairment (Goswami, 2011; Tallal, 2004).
However, it remains uncertain whether deficits in auditory processing contribute to the language difficulties experienced by many children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss (MMSNHL). We assessed the auditory processing and language skills of 49, 8-16 year old children with MMSNHL and 41 age-matched typically developing controls. Auditory processing abilities were assessed using child-friendly psychophysical techniques. Discrimination thresholds were obtained for stimuli spanning three different timescales (μs, ms, seconds), and across three different levels of complexity, from simple nonspeech tones (frequency discrimination, frequency modulation detection, rise-time discrimination), to complex nonspeech sounds (assessing discrimination of modulations in formant frequency, fundamental frequency, and amplitude), and speech sounds (/ba/-/da/ discrimination). Thresholds were obtained both when children with MMSNHL were wearing hearing aids and when they were not. Language abilities were assessed using a battery of standardised assessments of phonological processing, reading, vocabulary, and grammar.
Principal components analysis identified three components underlying the auditory processing test battery. The first, auditory processing (‘AP’) component appeared to reflect discrimination of temporal fine structure and spectral shape, and was significantly impaired in children with MMSNHL. Deficits in this component were almost always present in children with MMSNHL who had difficulties in language (i.e. they were necessary to cause language difficulties) but many children with deficits in AP had normal language (i.e. they were not sufficient). The second, ‘AMD’
component reflected discrimination of slow-rate amplitude modulation. Deficits in this component were rare in children with MMSNHL, including those who had poor language (they were not necessary) but when they were present they were almost always associated with poor language abilities (they were sufficient). Finally, deficits in the third, speech processing (‘SP’) component appeared to be neither necessary nor sufficient to cause language difficulties in children with MMSNHL. Our findings challenge the proposal for a one-to-one causal relationship between deficits in auditory processing and language difficulties in children with MMSNHL. Rather, they suggest that deficits in the discrimination of temporal fine structure and spectral shape are likely to comprise one of a number of risk factors for impaired language development in this group.
Acknowledgements Supported by the ESRC.
References
Goswami, U. 2011. A temporal sampling framework for developmental dyslexia. Trends Cog Sci, 15, 3-10.
Tallal, P. 2004. Improving language and literacy is a matter of time. Nat Rev Neurosci, 5, 721-728.
Assessing the role of parental report (ECLiPS) in supporting assessment of children referred for auditory processing disorder
J.G. Barry*, D. Tomlin, §,#, D.R. Moore*,$, H. Dillon‡,# *MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham, UK; § University of Melbourne, Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, Melbourne, Australia; ‡National Acoustics Laboratory, Sydney, Australia; #The Hearing Cooperative Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia; $Communication Sciences Research Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Department of Otolaryngology, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Children referred for auditory processing disorder (APD) present with a complex array of symptoms, in addition to listening difficulties. This has led to a debate about the nature of the APD, and the assessment and management of children affected by it. To progress understanding of APD, it is necessary to reliably capture the reason(s) why children present for assessment, and then relate those reasons both to the disorder itself, as well as to the broader range of listening-based learning difficulties. The Evaluation of Children’s Listening and Processing Skills (ECLiPS) (Barry &
Moore, 2014) was developed as a first step towards achieving these goals. The ECLiPS is a report- based measure comprising a five factor structure which is designed to assess everyday listening in the context of cognitive abilities commonly affected in APD.
Here, we performed a series of correlational and discriminant analyses to compare parental responses on the ECLiPS for 50 children (35 referred for suspected APD) with their performance on 5 tests used to diagnose APD, 4 tests of cognitive ability (nonverbal IQ, sustained attention and auditory serial and working memory, and 2 measures of academic ability.
Few correlations were observed between the ECLiPS and the diagnostic tests of APD, confirming previous conclusions of a mismatch between abilities probed by clinical tests of APD and report-based measures of listening difficulty. Correlations with all ECLiPS factors were observed with academic abilities (rs = 0.52 – 0.40). Finally, auditory working memory correlated with all ECLiPS factors (rs = 0.30– 0.45), while attention was associated with language abilities (rs
= 0.57). Discriminant analysis suggested the ECLiPS and a combination of auditory and cognitive tests was able to discriminate between the groups included in the stud with 83% accuracy. Overall, our findings suggest cognitive difficulties associate with many of the symptoms of APD that parents are sensitive to, and they further underline the importance of a broad-based assessment test battery incorporating parental report and cognitive testing.
Acknowledgements
Supported by the MRC, and MRC-T References
Barry, J.G. & Moore, D.R. (2014). Evaluation of Children’s Listening and Processing (ECLiPS) Manual, Edition 1.
Do children with hearing loss show atypical attention during ‘cocktail party’ listening?
E. Holmes*, P.T. Kitterick§ and A.Q. Summerfield*, *Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK, §NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Unit, Nottingham, UK
Individual differences in cocktail-party listening could arise from differences in either central attention or peripheral transduction. We aimed to isolate differences in attentional processing between normally-hearing and hearing-impaired children, based on a procedure devised by Hill and Miller (2010). During the presentation of acoustical stimuli, we expected to see differences in brain activity between normally-hearing and hearing-impaired children as a result of differences in
peripheral processing of speech. Differences before the onset of acoustical stimuli were expected to show differences in the control of attention without being confounded by differences in transduction.
Participants were 24 normally-hearing children and 11 children with moderate sensorineural hearing loss, all aged 7-16 years. We recorded brain activity using 64-channel electroencephalography. On each trial, two sentences spoken by adult talkers (one male and one female) were presented simultaneously from loudspeakers at two spatial locations (one left and one right of fixation). A third ‘child’ talker was presented from straight ahead. Participants were cued, in advance of the acoustic stimuli, to either the location (left/right) or the gender (male/female) of the target talker. The task was to report key words spoken by that talker. A control condition, in which the visual cues did not have implications for attention, allowed cortical activity evoked by the configurational properties of the cues to be distinguished from activity evoked by attentional processes.
Children with normal hearing displayed differences in event-related potentials (ERPs) between trials that cued the location compared to the gender of the target talker. Evidence of cue-specific preparatory attention, manifest as more positive ERPs evoked by the cue to location than gender in posterior scalp locations, started approximately 950 ms after the onset of the visual cue. Sustained cue-specific selective attention started approximately 350 ms after the onset of acoustical stimuli.
During both of these time windows, children with hearing loss showed smaller differences between location and gender trials than normally-hearing children. We expected to find atypical activity during the acoustical stimuli, which could be explained by peripheral transduction. Importantly, we also found atypical brain activity during the preparatory phase, which cannot be attributed to peripheral transduction. The results suggest that children with hearing loss do not utilise location or gender information to prepare for an upcoming talker. This deficit may contribute to their difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments.
Acknowledgements
EH is supported by the Goodricke Appeal Fund.
References
Hill K.T. & Miller L.M. 2010. Auditory attentional control and selection during cocktail party listening. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 583-590.
Temporal asymmetry and loudness : amplitude envelope sensitivity in developmental dyslexia S.A. Flanagan and U. Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
One auditory difficulty found in children with developmental dyslexia is impaired processing of the amplitude envelope of a sound (Goswami et al, 2002). Children with dyslexia also show impaired
‘phonological awareness’, the ability to reflect on the constituent sound elements in words. Deficits in amplitude envelope processing are related to phonological deficits in dyslexia, across languages.
Sensitivity to envelope structure and dynamics is critical for speech perception as it signals speech rate, stress, and tonal contrasts, and reflects prosodic and intonational information.
Here we replicated the experiment of Stecker and Hafter (2000) to investigate temporal asymmetry of the envelope; the difference between sounds that increase in level slowly and have fast offsets (i.e., S-F) and those that have fast onsets and slow, damped offsets (i.e., F-S) in a paired comparison. These pairs of sounds have identical overall spectral contents, durations, and level.
We report on the results of 14 subjects who were in the range 8 – 12 years, 7 of whom were dyslexic and 7 were typically developing readers. The results for the typical readers was similar to
those found by Stecker and Hafter with an overall loudness advantage for S-F test tones, with the effect attenuated by the context of a damped, S-F, standard. However, for the dyslexic subjects the results were consistently different from the typical readers, and those of Stecker and Hafter. For the dyslexic subjects the loudness advantage for S-F test tones was greatly reduced and in some instances reversed for both conditions of the standard. This is opposite to the general findings for the perception of ramped and damped sounds (Ries et al, 2008). Impaired neural entrainment to the onset envelope in developmental dyslexia as proposed in the temporal sampling framework (Goswami, 2011) could explain the reduced or absent loudness advantage for S-F tones.
Acknowledgements
Supported by the Daphne Jackson Trust and the University of Cambridge.
References
Goswami U. et al, 2002. Amplitude envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: a new hypothesis.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 99, 10911- 10916
Stecker G. C. & Hafter E. R. 2000. Temporal asymmetry and loudness. J Acoust Soc Am, 107, 3359 -3362
Ries D.T., Schlauch R.S. & DiGiovanni J.J. 2008 The role of temporal-masking patterns in the determination of subjective duration and loudness for ramped and damped sounds. J Acoust Soc Am, 124, 3772-3783
Goswami U., 2011 A temporal sampling framework for developmental dyslexia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 3-10.
Learning to ignore background noise in VCV test
L.Zhang*, P.Jennings* and F. Schlaghecken§,*WMG, University of Warwick, UK, §Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK
Experiments on perceptual learning in the visual domain show that people can improve their detection performance by learning to ignore (visual) 'noise'. Once participants have learned to ignore the constant visual noise and can successfully detect targets, this skill then transfers to new, random visual noise (Schubo, et al., 2001). This study explores whether this also follows for perceptual learning in the hearing domain. It aims to investigate if it is possible to improve our brains’ ability to process auditory stimuli by training a listener to ignore background noise and recognise the sounds of consonants across time. In addition, Felty et al (2009) demonstrated that listeners achieved better word recognition performance with fixed babble noise than with random babble noise. This research also investigates if the learning effect is generalised from training normal hearing listeners under fixed babble noise to random background environments. Twenty normal-hearing English native speakers (aged between18 to 40) participated in an experiment. They were randomly assigned to a fixed or random babble noise training goup. Both groups were required to do a pre and post test with vowel consonant vowel (VCV) tasks (including eight consonants /b/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /p/ with male and female voices) in random babble noise. The background noise for the three days training session was different for each group (the fixed group was trained with constant babble noise and the other one was trained with random babble noise).
The results from this study show how people’s listening performance can be improved with training to ignore fixed and random babble noise.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. James Harte, Dr. Katherine Roberts and Professor Christopher James for their useful suggestions for the experiment set up.
References
Felty RA, Buchwald A, Pisoni D.B. 2009. Adaptation to frozen babble in spoken word recognition.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 125, 93-97.
Schubo, A., Schlaghecken, F., & Meinecke, C. (2001). Learning to ignorethe mask in texture segmentation tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 919–931.
Cognitive listening fatigue with degraded speech
A. Sarampalis*, D. Alfandari*, J.H. Gmelin*, M.F. Lohden*, A.F. Pietrus-Rajman* and D.
Başkent§, *Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands,
§Department of Otorhinolaryngology / Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Degradations in the speech signal, either because of external factors (such as background noise, reverberation, or poor signal transmission) or internal factors (such as hearing loss or ageing) often lead to reduced intelligibility and increases in listening effort. We use the term listening effort to refer to the proportion of cognitive resources allocated to the task of understanding speech. There is now ample evidence that even when intelligibility remains unchanged, reductions in the quality of the speech signal result in increases of listening effort in a variety of tasks and paradigms, suggesting that basic intelligibility measures are insufficient in fully evaluating some important aspects of speech communication.
One frequently-reported consequence of increased listening effort is mental fatigue. Elderly individuals and those with hearing problems often complain of fatigue in difficult listening settings.
Nevertheless, there have been few attempts to investigate listening fatigue empirically. We use the term cognitive listening fatigue (CLF) to describe performance decreases in an auditory task as a result of sustained effort. The aim of the present study is two-fold: first to identify the most suitable tasks and methods for measuring CLF and second to investigate the hypothesis that mildly degraded speech leads to increased fatigue when compared to undegraded speech.
We used four cognitively-demanding auditory tasks, some adapted in the auditory domain for the first time, each imposing different cognitive demands on the listener, such as selective attention, inhibition, and working memory in a procedure that lasted 120 minutes of uninterrupted testing.
Specifically, an auditory Stroop task, a dichotic-listening task, a flanker task, and a syllogisms task were each repeated three times in 10-minute blocks of trials in a counterbalanced order.
Participants’ reaction times and accuracy were recorded, as well as a subjective measure of their willingness to continue after each block. Half of the participants listened to undegraded speech, the others to spectrally degraded signals.
Reaction times decreased throughout the entire testing session, for all four tasks. Participants became progressively faster in their responses, even when their accuracy did not markedly decrease.
The greatest decrease in accuracy was seen in the dichotic listening task where, after an initial period of improvement (presumably due to practice), performance decreased in the latter part of testing. The subjective measure showed marked decreases in the willingness to continue with the experiment after approximately 70 minutes. There was little difference in these effects between the degraded and undegraded condition, which may have been due to the mild nature of the degradation. Overall, these results indicate that there was transfer of fatigue from one task to the next, but a single-task procedure may be more effective in measuring fatigue. Nevertheless, fatigue was evident in at least one of these tasks.
Declaration of interest:
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
A link between auditory attention and self perceived communication success in older listeners D. Kunke*, M. J. Henry*, R. Hannemann§, M. Serman§ and J. Obleser*, *Max Planck Research Group, „Auditory Cognition“, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, §Siemens Audiologische Technik GmbH, Erlangen, Germany.
Many studies show that current standard practice in audiology including pure tone audiometry and speech audiometry have limited application in gaging the every day communication success of individuals. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between auditory attention and every day listening skills in the older population. Auditory rhythmic sequences of low frequency tones (a same–different judgement of a standard and a temporally jittered target tone, separated by a series of 6 intervening distracting tones; similar to the Jones, et al, 2002 design) were used to test the performance of 38 older listeners between the ages of 50 and 80 years who presented with hearing thresholds of 20 dB HL or better in the task-critical frequency range (0.25 – 1 kHz). We employed this judgement task in three different conditions (discriminating the acoustic dimensions pitch, loudness and interaural time differences i.e. direction). Test-retest reliability was calculated and results show that the pitch discrimination task was the most reliable test (r > 0.85). Performance was assessed for each condition as perceptual sensitivity (d´), response bias (decision criterion, c), and reaction time. Participants were also asked to complete a short version of the (SSQ) Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (Gatehouse & Noble, 2004). Sensitivity in the pitch task predicted significantly the self-assessed speech scale of the SSQ (r = 0.496, p = 0.002), while auditory threshold and speech audiometry results (Oldenburger sentence test and the Freiburger word test) did not (all p > 0.15). Not only do these findings imply a link between auditory attention and everyday communication success, but this can also be an important step towards a valid and reliable screening tool.
Acknowledgements
Supported by Siemens Audiologische Technik and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
References
Gatehouse S. & Noble W. 2004. The speech, spatial and qualities of hearing scale (SSQ). Int J Audiol, 43(2), 85-99.
Jones M.R., Moznihan H., Mackenzie N. & Puente J. 2002. Temporal aspects of stimulus-driven attending in dynamic arrays. Psychological Science, 13(4), 313-319.
