Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1987

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Speech and Hearing Science

Major Professor

David M. Lipscomb

Committee Members

Allan Diefendorf, James Schmidhammer, Anna K. Nabelek, Samuel B. Burchfield

Abstract

For this investigation twenty-seven subjects with normal pure tone thresholds and speech discrimination scores were divided into two groups and studied. The first group (normal/normal-NN) consisted of 18 subjects with no complaints of difficulty hearing, and the second group (normal/abnormal-NA) consisted of nine subjects who complained of difficulty in hearing speech, especially in less than perfect listening conditions. Measures of frequency resolution, binaural release from masking and speech in noise and/or reverberation were used to determine if differences existed between the groups. Results indicated that the two groups investigated differed appreciably when more rigorous testing was conducted. These differences were determined with a combination of three assessment tools:

1) personal opinion of hearing ability;

2) response to a questionnaire;

3) performance on measures of MLD, slope and peak of the masking curve and discrimination of speech under reverberant conditions.

The eight subjects from subgroup NA shown to have hearing difficulties had smaller MLD's, greater upward spread of masking, and greater difficulty discriminating reverberant speech. These data suggest that the locus the auditory dysfunction for these NA subjects was in the cochlea.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS