Establishing a clinical measure of spectral-ripple discrimination

Abstract

Spectral-ripple discrimination thresholds have been used effectively to assess frequency-resolving power in cochlear implant users. To improve potential clinical utility as a reliable and time-efficient measure of auditory bandwidth for listeners with acoustic hearing, possible confounds and limitations of the method must be addressed. This study examined frequency specificity and the possibility of edge-listening with narrowband stimuli. An adaptive 4-IFC procedure was used to determine ripple discrimination thresholds for normally hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Stimuli were broadband (100–5000 Hz), high pass (1000–5000 Hz), or low pass (100–1000 Hz) logarithmically scaled, sinusoidally modulated Gaussian noises. In some conditions, Gaussian flanking noise was introduced to eliminate potential edge-listening cues. As expected, discrimination thresholds were significantly reduced for the HI listeners. Additionally, results indicate that both NH and HI listeners are able to use edge cues to improve discrimination thresholds. The introduction of flanking noise significantly reduced thresholds, and this effect was largest for the high pass stimuli. These results can be used to evaluate the usefulness of this method as a rapid and efficient means of assessing the effective frequency bandwidth of listeners with acoustical hearing. [Work supported by NIH.]

Comparing auditory filter bandwidths, spectral ripple modulation detection, spectral ripple discrimination, and speech recognition: Normal and impaired hearing

“…The significant correlation between these spectral measures and clinical measures such as NU-6 WRS and QuickSIN is promising and may indicate potential clinical viability for the spectral ripple modulation depth detection task. Time efficient measures of the ripple task (Drennan et al, 2014;Gifford et al, 2014;Molis et al, 2014) may present a clinically valid tool that can be used for diagnostic evaluations and predicting amplification outcomes for listeners with hearing loss. • SRD significantly correlated with all four SMD measures.…”

Cognitive Abilities Contribute to Spectro-Temporal Discrimination in Children Who Are Hard of Hearing

“…Historically, auditory-specific capacities, such as spectral resolution, have been difficult to measure in children due to the complexity of some psychoacoustic procedures. However, recent research suggests that spectral ripple tasks can be adapted for clinical use with children as non-linguistic measures of signal fidelity in the auditory system (Drennan et al 2014(Drennan et al , 2016Molis et al 2014). Ripple tasks typically require the listener to discriminate between broadband noises with contrasting distributions of spectral peaks and valleys, and ripple threshold is expressed as the maximum number of ripples per octave that the listener can reliably differentiate.…”