This study showed the possible benefits from alternative electrode configurations for measuring bone-conducted-evoked oVEMPs in comparison with the standard electrode configuration. The nose configuration seems promising, but further research is required to justify clinical use of this placement.

No abstract

In speech audiometric testing, hearing performance is typically measured by calculating the number of correct repetitions of a speech stimulus. We investigate to what extent the repetition accuracy of Dutch speech stimuli presented against a background noise is influenced by nonauditory processes. We show that variation in verbal repetition accuracy is partially explained by morpholexical and syntactic features of the target language. Verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and pronouns yield significantly lower correct repetitions than nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. The reduced repetition performance for verbs and function words is probably best explained by the similarities in the perceptual nature of verbal morphology and function words in Dutch. For sentences, an overall negative effect of syntactic complexity on speech repetition accuracy was found. The lowest number of correct repetitions was obtained with passive sentences, reflecting the cognitive cost of processing a noncanonical sentence structure. Taken together, these findings may have important implications for the audiological practice. In combination with hearing loss, linguistic complexity may increase the cognitive demands to process sentences in noise, leading to suboptimal functional hearing in day-to-day listening situations. Using test sentences with varying degrees of syntactic complexity may therefore provide useful information to measure functional hearing benefits.

Objectives: Previous research has shown that children with cochlear implants (CIs) encounter more communication difficulties than their normal-hearing (NH) peers in kindergarten and elementary schools. Yet, little is known about the potential listening difficulties that children with CIs may experience during secondary education. The aim of this study was to investigate the listening difficulties of children with a CI in mainstream secondary education and to compare these results to the difficulties of their NH peers and the difficulties observed by their teachers. Design: The Dutch version of the Listening Inventory for Education Revised (LIFE-R) was administered to 19 children (mean age = 13 years 9 months; SD = 9 months) who received a CI early in life, to their NH classmates (n = 239), and to their teachers (n = 18). All participants were enrolled in mainstream secondary education in Flanders (first to fourth grades). The Listening Inventory for Secondary Education consists of 15 typical listening situations as experienced by students (LIFEstudent) during class activities (LIFEclass) and during social activities at school (LIFEsocial). The teachers completed a separate version of the Listening Inventory for Secondary Education (LIFEteacher) and Screening Instrument for Targeting Educational Risk. Results: Participants with CIs reported significantly more listening difficulties than their NH peers. A regression model estimated that 75% of the participants with CIs were at risk of experiencing listening difficulties. The chances of experiencing listening difficulties were significantly higher in participants with CIs for 7 out of 15 listening situations. The 3 listening situations that had the highest chance of resulting in listening difficulties were (1) listening during group work, (2) listening to multimedia, and (3) listening in large-sized classrooms. Results of the teacher’s questionnaires (LIFEteacher and Screening Instrument for Targeting Educational Risk) did not show a similar significant difference in listening difficulties between participants with a CI and their NH peers. According to teachers, NH participants even obtained significantly lower scores for staying on task and for participation in class than participants with a CI. Conclusions: Although children with a CI seemingly fit in well in mainstream schools, they still experience significantly more listening difficulties than their NH peers. Low signal to noise ratios (SNRs), distortions of the speech signal (multimedia, reverberation), distance, lack of visual support, and directivity effects of the microphones were identified as difficulties for children with a CI in the classroom. As teachers may not always notice these listening difficulties, a list of practical recommendations was provided in this study, to raise awareness among teachers and to minimize the difficulties.

Purpose: To overcome the potential tension between clinical and ecological validity in speech audiometric assessment by creating a new set of sentence materials with high linguistic validity for the Dutch-speaking area. Methods: A linguistic “fingerprint” of modern spoken Dutch and Flemish served to generate a set of sentences recorded from 1 male and 1 female talker. The sentences were presented to 30 normal-hearing listeners in stationary speech noise at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of –5 dB sound pressure level (SPL). A list design criterion was used to achieve perceptive homogeneity across the test lists, by scrambling lists of sentences of different syntactic types while controlling for linguistic complexity. The original set of test materials was narrowed down to 360 sentences, and list equivalency was evaluated at the audiological and linguistic levels. A psychometric curve was generated with a resolution of 2 dB based on a second group of 60 young normal-hearing native speakers of Dutch and Flemish. Results: Sentence understanding showed an average repetition accuracy of 63.40% (SD 1.01) across the lists at an SNR of –5 dB SPL. No significant differences were found between the lists at the level of the individual listener. At the linguistic level, the sentence lists showed an equal distribution of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features. Conclusion: LiCoS combines the clinical benefit of acoustic control at the list level with the high ecological validity of linguistically representative test items. The new speech audiometric test is particularly appropriate to assess sentence understanding in individuals who would otherwise exhibit near-ceiling performance when tested with linguistically more simplified test stimuli. In combination with pure tone audiometric assessment, LiCoS provides valuable complementary information with respect to the functional hearing of patients.