Biomedical subjects

Kathleen M Cienkowski

Publications and source records attributed to Kathleen M Cienkowski.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Normative data for the Attitudes towards Loss of Hearing Questionnaire.

Investigations have shown that patient attitudes toward hearing loss and hearing aids impact self-reported handicap and disability, hearing aid benefit, and hearing aid use. The Attitudes towards Loss of Hearing Questionnaire (ALHQ) was developed by Saunders and Cienkowski (1996) to examine some of the psychosocial factors underlying the use and acquisition of hearing aids. Here we report data from a new version of questionnaire (ALHQ v2.1), which examines attitudes towards hearing loss and hearing aids on five scales: Denial of Hearing Loss, Negative Associations, Negative Coping Strategies, Manual Dexterity and Vision, and Hearing-Related Esteem. Reliability values, internal consistency values, and cut points for typical and atypical scores are provided, along with comparison of the scores of women, men, current hearing aid users, non-hearing aid users, and paying versus nonpaying individuals. The ALHQ takes about ten minutes to complete and identifies for the clinician some of the issues that might jeopardize successful hearing aid outcome.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2004

Auditory-visual speech perception in an adult with aphasia.

The evaluation of auditory-visual speech perception is not typically undertaken in the assessment of aphasia; however, treatment approaches utilise bimodal presentations. Research demonstrates that auditory and visual information are integrated for speech perception. The strongest evidence of this cross-modal integration is the McGurk effect. This indirect measure of integration shows that presentation of conflicting tokens may change perception (e.g. auditory /bi/ + visual /gi/ = /di/). The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of a person with mild aphasia to identify tokens presented in auditory-only, visual-only and auditory-visual conditions. It was hypothesized that performance would be best in the bimodal condition and that presence of the McGurk effect would demonstrate integration of speech information. Findings did not support the hypotheses. It is suspected that successful integration of AV speech information was limited by a perseverative response pattern. This case study suggests the use of bisensory speech information may be impaired in adults with aphasia.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2002

Auditory-visual speech perception and aging.

OBJECTIVE: This experiment was designed to assess the integration of auditory and visual information for speech perception in older adults. The integration of place and voicing information was assessed across modalities using the McGurk effect. The following questions were addressed: 1) Are older adults as successful as younger adults at integrating auditory and visual information for speech perception? 2) Is successful integration of this information related to lipreading performance? DESIGN: The performance of three groups of participants was compared: young adults with normal hearing and vision, older adults with normal to near-normal hearing and vision, and young controls, whose hearing thresholds were shifted with noise to match the older adults. Each participant completed a lipreading test and auditory and auditory-plus-visual identification of syllables with conflicting auditory and visual cues. RESULTS: The results show that on average older adults are as successful as young adults at integrating auditory and visual information for speech perception at the syllable level. The number of fused responses did not differ for the CV tokens across the ages tested. Although there were no significant differences between groups for integration at the syllable level, there were differences in the response alternatives chosen. Young adults with normal peripheral sensitivity often chose an auditory alternative whereas, older adults and control participants leaned toward visual alternatives. In additions, older adults demonstrated poorer lipreading performance than their younger counterparts. This was not related to successful integration of information at the syllable level. CONCLUSIONS: Based on the findings of this study, when auditory and visual integration of speech information fails to occur, producing a nonfused response, participants select an alternative response from the modality with the least ambiguous signal.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2002

A test to measure subjective and objective speech intelligibility.

Measurement of hearing aid outcome is particularly difficult because there are numerous dimensions to consider (e.g., performance, satisfaction, benefit). Often there are discrepancies between scores in these dimensions. It is difficult to reconcile these discrepancies because the materials and formats used to measure each dimension are so very different. We report data obtained with an outcome measure that examines both objective and subjective dimensions with the same test format and materials and gives results in the same unit of measurement (signal-to-noise ratio). Two variables are measured: a "performance" speech reception threshold and a "perceptual" speech reception threshold. The signal-to-noise ratio difference between these is computed to determine the perceptual-performance discrepancy (PPDIS). The results showed that, on average, 48 percent of the variance in subjective ratings of a hearing aid could be explained by a combination of the performance speech reception threshold and the PPDIS. These findings suggest that the measure is potentially a valuable clinical tool.

Aged↗