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Description
The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits

The recent spotlight on concussion has illuminated deficits in the current standard of care with regard to addressing acute and persistent cognitive signs and symptoms of mild brain injury. This stems, in part, from the diffuse nature of the injury, which tends not to produce focal cognitive or behavioral deficits that are easily identified or tracked. Indeed it has been shown that patients with enduring symptoms have difficulty describing their problems; therefore, there is an urgent need for a sensitive measure of brain activity that corresponds with higher order cognitive processing. The development of a neurophysiological metric that maps to clinical resolution would inform decisions about diagnosis and prognosis, including the need for clinical intervention to address cognitive deficits. The literature suggests the need for assessment of concussion under cognitively demanding tasks. Here, a joint behavioral- high-density electroencephalography (EEG) paradigm was employed. This allows for the examination of cortical activity patterns during speech comprehension at various levels of degradation in a sentence verification task, imposing the need for higher-order cognitive processes. Eight participants with concussion listened to true-false sentences produced with either moderately to highly intelligible noise-vocoders. Behavioral data were simultaneously collected. The analysis of cortical activation patterns included 1) the examination of event-related potentials, including latency and source localization, and 2) measures of frequency spectra and associated power. Individual performance patterns were assessed during acute injury and a return visit several months following injury. Results demonstrate a combination of task-related electrophysiology measures correspond to changes in task performance during the course of recovery. Further, a discriminant function analysis suggests EEG measures are more sensitive than behavioral measures in distinguishing between individuals with concussion and healthy controls at both injury and recovery, suggesting the robustness of neurophysiological measures during a cognitively demanding task to both injury and persisting pathophysiology.
ContributorsUtianski, Rene (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Caviness, John N (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The present study describes audiovisual sentence recognition in normal hearing listeners, bimodal cochlear implant (CI) listeners and bilateral CI listeners. This study explores a new set of sentences (the AzAV sentences) that were created to have equal auditory intelligibility and equal gain from visual information.

The aims of Experiment I

The present study describes audiovisual sentence recognition in normal hearing listeners, bimodal cochlear implant (CI) listeners and bilateral CI listeners. This study explores a new set of sentences (the AzAV sentences) that were created to have equal auditory intelligibility and equal gain from visual information.

The aims of Experiment I were to (i) compare the lip reading difficulty of the AzAV sentences to that of other sentence materials, (ii) compare the speech-reading ability of CI listeners to that of normal-hearing listeners and (iii) assess the gain in speech understanding when listeners have both auditory and visual information from easy-to-lip-read and difficult-to-lip read sentences. In addition, the sentence lists were subjected to a multi-level text analysis to determine the factors that make sentences easy or difficult to speech read.

The results of Experiment I showed that (i) the AzAV sentences were relatively difficult to lip read, (ii) that CI listeners and normal-hearing listeners did not differ in lip reading ability and (iii) that sentences with low lip-reading intelligibility (10-15 % correct) provide about a 30 percentage point improvement in speech understanding when added to the acoustic stimulus, while sentences with high lip-reading intelligibility (30-60 % correct) provide about a 50 percentage point improvement in the same comparison. The multi-level text analyses showed that the familiarity of phrases in the sentences was the primary driving factor that affects the lip reading difficulty.

The aim of Experiment II was to investigate the value, when visual information is present, of bimodal hearing and bilateral cochlear implants. The results of Experiment II showed that when visual information is present, low-frequency acoustic hearing can be of value to speech understanding for patients fit with a single CI. However, when visual information was available no gain was seen from the provision of a second CI, i.e., bilateral CIs. As was the case in Experiment I, visual information provided about a 30 percentage point improvement in speech understanding.
ContributorsWang, Shuai (Author) / Dorman, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
A multitude of individuals across the globe suffer from hearing loss and that number continues to grow. Cochlear implants, while having limitations, provide electrical input for users enabling them to "hear" and more fully interact socially with their environment. There has been a clinical shift to the

A multitude of individuals across the globe suffer from hearing loss and that number continues to grow. Cochlear implants, while having limitations, provide electrical input for users enabling them to "hear" and more fully interact socially with their environment. There has been a clinical shift to the bilateral placement of implants in both ears and to bimodal placement of a hearing aid in the contralateral ear if residual hearing is present. However, there is potentially more to subsequent speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users than the electric and acoustic input being received via these modalities. For normal listeners vision plays a role and Rosenblum (2005) points out it is a key feature of an integrated perceptual process. Logically, cochlear implant users should also benefit from integrated visual input. The question is how exactly does vision provide benefit to bilateral and bimodal users. Eight (8) bilateral and 5 bimodal participants received randomized experimental phrases previously generated by Liss et al. (1998) in auditory and audiovisual conditions. The participants recorded their perception of the input. Data were consequently analyzed for percent words correct, consonant errors, and lexical boundary error types. Overall, vision was found to improve speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant participants. Each group experienced a significant increase in percent words correct when visual input was added. With vision bilateral participants reduced consonant place errors and demonstrated increased use of syllabic stress cues used in lexical segmentation. Therefore, results suggest vision might provide perceptual benefits for bilateral cochlear implant users by granting access to place information and by augmenting cues for syllabic stress in the absence of acoustic input. On the other hand vision did not provide the bimodal participants significantly increased access to place and stress cues. Therefore the exact mechanism by which bimodal implant users improved speech perception with the addition of vision is unknown. These results point to the complexities of audiovisual integration during speech perception and the need for continued research regarding the benefit vision provides to bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users.
ContributorsLudwig, Cimarron (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis advisor) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015