Hearing Loss and Speech Understanding

3 credits · Graduate School

This seminar course will use student-led journal discussions and a group research project to examine various factors that contribute to the speech understanding difficulties of persons with hearing loss (with a focus on older adults with hearing loss). The contribution of individual factors, such as variations in degree of hearing loss (audibility), suprathreshold processing abilities (e.g ., frequency and temporal resolution), and cognitive abilities will be discussed. In addition, the impact of environmental factors, such as the level and type of background noise, reverberation, and talker characteristics, on unaided and aided speech understanding will be discussed. Finally, students will complete a group research project using ANSI S3.5 Methods for Calculation of the Speech Intelligibility Index to explore the impact of some of these factors on speech understanding. prerequisites - undergraduate degree in Hearing and Speech Sciences or permission of the instructor. Offered Spring semester, biennially (even numbered years). [3]