Frederick N. Martin

Insert earphone depth and the occlusion effect.

Twenty individuals were tested to determine the occlusion effect caused by supraaural earphones and by insert earphones with shallow and deep insertion of its foam eartip. The bone-conduction oscillator was placed both on the forehead and the mastoid. It was concluded that using deeply inserted earphones is the most practical way in which to carry out clinical bone-conduction measurements.

Performance of Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers of English and Spanish on the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test

Differences in the performance of adults with normal hearing were evaluated on the English and Spanish versions of the Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI) test in the ipsilateral competing message (ICM) format. Previous work has shown that bilingual subjects perform significantly better on the Spanish version of the SSI at a –30 dB message-to-competition ratio (MCR). The previous investigators attributed this difference in performance to the existence of a greater number of pauses in the competing message of the Spanish version compared to the English version. In the present study, seven bilingual speakers and ten monolingual speakers each of English and Spanish completed two conditions—the standard competing message (SC) and the competing message mixed with speech noise (SC+N)—in order to reduce or eliminate the effect of pauses on performance. Bilingual subjects’ scores in each language were not significantly different from monolingual subjects’ scores. Scores from bilinguals were significantly bett...

A Varying Intensity Story Test for Simulated Hearing Loss

The use of a procedure that varies the intensity of critical portions of a story for purposes of quantifying the degree of pseudohypacusis was examined. Results indicated that this procedure can be used to identify normal hearing people who are asked to feign a hearing loss. It was found that, for most subjects, it was possible to determine that their true auditory thresholds were at least 30 dB below what they claimed as their voluntary (simulated) levels.

Cross hearing—air conduction or bone conduction

Unilaterally anacusic Ss were given pure-tone threshold tests in each ear, with and without the good ear plugged. The threshold shift produced by the plug was less for the bad ear than for the good ear. Since interaural attenuation was unaffected by the plug, it was concluded that cross-hearing occurs via bone conduction.