Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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Description
The purpose of the present study was to determine if vocabulary knowledge is related to degree of hearing loss. A 50-question multiple-choice vocabulary test comprised of old and new words was administered to 43 adults with hearing loss (19 to 92 years old) and 51 adults with normal hearing (20 to 40 years old). Degree of hearing loss ranged from mild to moderately-severe as determined by bilateral pure-tone thresholds. Education levels ranged from some high school to graduate degrees. It was predicted that knowledge of new words would decrease with increasing hearing loss, whereas knowledge of old words would be unaffected. The Test of Contemporary Vocabulary (TCV) was developed for this study and contained words with old and new definitions. The vocabulary scores were subjected to repeated-measures ANOVA with definition type (old and new) as the within-subjects factor. Hearing level and education were between-subjects factors, while age was entered as a covariate. The results revealed no main effect of age or education level, while a significant main effect of hearing level was observed. Specifically, performance for new words decreased significantly as degree of hearing loss increased. A similar effect was not observed for old words. These results indicate that knowledge of new definitions is inversely related to degree of hearing loss.
ContributorsMarzan, Nicole Ann (Author) / Pittman, Andrea (Thesis director) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Wexler, Kathryn (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Spatial awareness (i.e., the sense of the space that we are in) involves the integration of auditory, visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive sensory information of environmental events. Hearing impairment has negative effects on spatial awareness and can result in deficits in communication and the overall aesthetic experience of life, especially in noisy or reverberant environments. This deficit occurs as hearing impairment reduces the signal strength needed for auditory spatial processing and changes how auditory information is combined with other sensory inputs (e.g., vision). The influence of multisensory processing on spatial awareness in listeners with normal, and impaired hearing is not assessed in clinical evaluations, and patients’ everyday sensory experiences are currently not directly measurable. This dissertation investigated the role of vision in auditory localization in listeners with normal, and impaired hearing in a naturalistic stimulus setting, using natural gaze orienting responses. Experiments examined two behavioral outcomes—response accuracy and response time—based on eye movement in response to simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli. The first set of experiments examined the effects of stimulus spatial saliency on response accuracy and response time and the extent of visual dominance in both metrics in auditory localization. The results indicate that vision can significantly influence both the speed and accuracy of auditory localization, especially when auditory stimuli are more ambiguous. The influence of vision is shown for both normal hearing- and hearing-impaired listeners. The second set of experiments examined the effect of frontal visual stimulation on localizing an auditory target presented from in front of or behind a listener. The results show domain-specific effects of visual capture on both response time and response accuracy. These results support previous findings that auditory-visual interactions are not limited by the spatial rule of proximity. These results further suggest the strong influence of vision on both the processing and the decision-making stages of sound source localization for both listeners with normal, and impaired hearing.
ContributorsClayton, Colton (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Daliri, Ayoub (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021