1. Chapter 9 Auditory
Perry C. Hanavan, Au.D.

2. Major Divisions of the Ear
Peripheral Mechanism
Central Mechanism
Outer Ear
Middle Ear
Inner Ear
VIII Cranial Nerve
Brain

3. Pinna

4. Function of Outer Ear Collect sound Localization Resonator Protection
Sensitive (earlobe)
Other?

5. Outer Ear Resonance Influence of pinna (p) Influence of ear canal (c)
Combine influence (t)
At 3000 Hz, the final amplification (t) is 20 dB

6. Pinna The visible portion that is commonly referred to as "the ear"
Helps localize sound sources
Directs sound into the ear
Each individual's pinna creates a distinctive imprint on the acoustic wave traveling into the auditory canal

7. External Auditory Meatus
Extends from the pinna to the tympanic membrane
About 26 millimeters (mm) in length and 7 mm in diameter in adult ear.
Size and shape vary among individuals.
Protects the eardrum
Resonator
Provides about 10 decibels (dB) of gain to the eardrum at around 3,300 Hertz (Hz).
The net effect of the head, pinna, and ear canal is that sounds in the 2,000 to 4,000 Hz region are amplified by 10 to 15 dB.
Sensitivity to sounds greatest in this frequency region
Noises in this range are the most hazardous to hearing

8. Outer Ear Resonance Influence of pinna (p) Influence of ear canal (m)
Combine influence (t)
At 3000 Hz, the final amplification (t) is 20 dB

9. Middle Ear Tympanic Cavity Tympanic Membrane Ossicles
Virtual Tour of the Ear
Middle Ear Cavity
Ossicles
Middle Ear Muscles
Mastoid
Eustachian Tube
Function Amplifier
Tympanic Cavity
Tympanic Membrane
Ossicles
Middle Ear Muscles
Eustachian Tube
Mastoid

10. Function of Middle Ear Conduction Protection Transducer Amplifier
Conduct sound from the outer ear to the inner ear
Protection
Creates a barrier that protects the middle and inner areas from foreign objects
Middle ear muscles may provide protection from loud sounds
Transducer
Converts acoustic energy to mechanical energy
Converts mechanical energy to hydraulic energy
Amplifier
Transformer action of the middle ear
only about 1/1000 of the acoustic energy in air would be transmitted to the inner-ear fluids (about 30 dB hearing loss)

11. Transformer/Amplifier
Area ratio
Thumbtack
Lever
crowbar

12. Area Ratio

13. Middle Ear Muscles Tensor tympani Stapedius
Attached to malleus
Innervated by V, trigeminal nerve
Stapedius
Attached to stapes
Innervated by VII, facial nerve
Middle Ear Muscle Function:
Protect inner ear from excessive sound levels
When ear exposed to sound levels above 70 dB, the muscles contract, decreasing amount of energy transferred to inner ear

14. Inner Ear Auditory Vestibular Virtual Tour of the Ear Vestibular
semicircular canals
utricle and saccule
Cochlear
traveling wave
Auditory
Vestibular

15. Organ of Corti

16. Hair Cells
Outer Hair Cells
Inner Hair Cells
OHC movie

17. Hair Cells
Outer Hair Cells
Inner Hair Cells
OHC movie

18. Traveling Waves Traveling wave Basilar membrane Traveling Wave info
Cochlear Traveling Wave

19. Basilar Membrane: Tonotopic

20. VIII CN: Afferent Neurons

21. OHC: Motile/Amplifier

22. Basilar Membrane: Tonotopic

23. VIII Cranial Nerve Auditory Branch Vestibular Branch
Virtual Tour of the Ear
Auditory Branch
Vestibular Branch
Spiral ganglion
Acoustic Tumors

24. Major Divisions of the Ear
Central Mechanism
Brain
Temporal Lobe
Midbrain
Brainsem

25. Temporal Lobe: Tonotopic

26. Central Auditory Path

27. Speech Perception How do we perceive speech?
Individual sounds (phonemes)?
Syllables?
Words?
Sentences?
How do we derive meaning from the ocean of sounds we hear?
Speech is variable
Speakers vary in speech
Variant or invariant cues?

28. Taking Statistics

29. "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water"

30. Perception of Phonemes

31. Audibility

32. Liberman and colleagues (1957) showed a phoneme boundary effect:
Alvin Liberman (1917 – 2000)
Liberman and colleagues (1957) showed a phoneme boundary effect:
A smaller change in delay was necessary to distinguish /b/ from /p/, than to distinguish two phonemes within these categories.

33. The phoneme boundary effect
Motor theory of speech perception: The phoneme boundary effect is caused by activation of the motor program required to produce a phoneme.

34. Category boundary effects in the colour domain
Question: Is the way we sense colour affected by the words for colours in our language?
Benjamin Lee Whorf
( )

35. Color can be objectively measured in terms of its wavelength:
The question about colour perception can be operationalized:
Color can be objectively measured in terms of its wavelength:
400n m nm nm
Wavelength

36. Not subsumed by another term.
The question about colour perception can be operationalized:
The number of basic color terms in a language can be measured. Basic color terms are:
Single words.
Not subsumed by another term.
Not restricted to a particular class of objects.

37. Dani (New Guinea): Two basic colour terms - mili (light), mola (dark).
Early research on color naming
Different languages have a variation in the number of words for colour categories.
Dani (New Guinea): Two basic colour terms - mili (light), mola (dark).
English: eleven basic color terms – white, black, grey, red green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, pink, brown.

38. Compared English and Tamahumara speakers.
Kay and Kempton (1984)
Compared English and Tamahumara speakers.
Tamahumara does not make a distinction between blue and green.
Kay and Kempton theorized that the perceptual distance between blue and green would be exaggerated in English speakers.

39. 3 green G G G 2 green, 1 blue G G B B 3 blue B B
Kay and Kempton (1984)
3 green G G G
2 green,
1 blue G G B B
3 blue B B

40. Kay and Kempton (1984)
Tamahumara speakers were equally likely to choose either extreme for all three types of triplet.

41. Kay and Kempton (1984)
English speakers were the same when all chips came from the same category.
When there was an odd one out, they were more likely to choose that one.

42. Perception of Vowels
/a/ vowel has greatest intensity with unvoiced /θ/ as weakest consonant
Front vowels perceived on basis of F1 frequency and average of F2 and F3, whereas back vowels are perceived on the basis of the average of F1 and F2, as well as F3
So is it the absolute frequency values of the formants?
Or the ratio of F2 to F1?
Perhaps it is the invariant cues (frequency changes that occur with coarticulation
F1/F2 F3 F1
F2/F3

43. Invariant and Variant Cues
Showing how onset formant transitions that define perceptually consonant [d] differ depending on the identity of the following vowel. (Formants highlighted by red dotted lines; transitions are the bending beginnings of the formant trajectories.)
/di/
/da/
/du/

44. Perception of Diphthongs
Perceived on basis of formant transitions
Salient feature: rapidity of transition

45. Consonant Perceptions
Perception different for consonants than vowels
Greater variety of consonant types than vowels
Greater complexity for consonants

46. Question
Which is TRUE regarding the following statements about categorical perception?
Experience of percept invariances in sensory phenomena that can be varied along a continuum.
Can be inborn or can be induced by learning.
Related to how neural networks in our brains detect the features that allow us to sort the things in the world into separate categories
All the above are true
All the above are false

47. Categorical Perception
Experience of percept invariances in sensory phenomena that can be varied along a continuum.
Can be inborn or can be induced by learning.
Related to how neural networks in our brains detect the features that allow us to sort the things in the world into separate categories 
area in the left prefrontal cortex has been localized as the place in the brain responsible for phonetic categorical perception

48. Categorical Perception

49. Identification/Recognition
Hearing loss affects the ability to correctly identify or label sound(s)
Vowels relatively easy
Consonants more difficulty to identify
Place of production errors common
High frequency consonants (sibilants) extremely difficult to identify

50. QuickSin/BKBSIN SNR Loss

51. UWO Plurals Test
Test designed to test high frequency consonant detection, and assist with determining audibility.

52. Phoneme Perception Test

53. CI CI offers one treatment option
Phonak remote Dynamic FM best for classroom noise conditions
Currently, addition of classroom amplification with CI with FM shows no benefit

54. Siemens Hearing Test (Free)

55. iOS: iTalkAtMoog

56. Ling 6 (iOS)($1.99)

57. Cochlear HOPE Words Lite and HD

58. Cochlear HOPE App (Apple)
Cochlear HOPE program
Adopted from Speech Sounds and Speech Sounds Vowels
Listen to a word and matching their speech production to what they heard.
Vocabulary development also facilitated
Each letter of alphabet has twenty different flashcards
In some instances, letter may have two different speech sounds (for example, “A” as in “way” or “A” as in “cat”)

59. Baldi (iOS App $4.99)

60. Auditory Verbal iPad ($3.99)

61. Generate distortions

62. Hearing Aids Hearing aids FM remote microphones
Phonak Dynamic FM best for background noise conditions
Extended high frequency bandpass hearing aids (250-10,000 Hz)
Non-linear frequency compression hearing aids

63. Phonak Dynamic FM Recievers

64. Non-linear Freq Compresion

65. Classroom Amplification
Phonak Dynamic FM
Phonak Dynamic FM in Classroom

66. Otitis Media
Prevalent among children birth to 6. At-risk children for OM:
Down Syndrome
Cleft Palate (cranial facial)
Treacher-Collins (cranial facial)
2nd-hand smoke
Day-care
Low income (Inner city, Native Americans, etc.)
Bottle fed rather than breast fed
Allergies
Other infections (upper respiratory)
Immune suppression (HIV, AIDS, etc.)
Pacifier
Family history

67. OME Tendencies Language impairments Poor phonetic processing
At-risk for developmental delays in perceptual and phonemic awareness, thus leading to difficulties with higher level language functioning and reading

68. Specific Language Impairment
Characterized by difficulty with language that is not caused by:
known neurological,
sensory,
intellectual, or
emotional deficit.
Can affect the development of:
vocabulary,
grammar, and
discourse skills,
with evidence that certain morphemes may be especially difficult to acquire (including past tense, copula be, third person singular).

69. SLI (cont.)
Children with SLI may be intelligent and healthy in all regards except in the difficulty they have with language.
They may in fact be extraordinarily bright and have high nonverbal IQs.
Children with SLI usually learn to talk late
child 3 or 4 years of age with limited vocabulary and short utterances.
Likely to be the kinds of kids who are told by parents and teachers they are smart but unmotivated and they just need to try harder.

70. SLI (cont.)
Difficulty processing rapid acoustic speech cues (temporal processing problem)
Difficulty identifying formant transitions, thus difficulty identifying phonemes
Children of the Code
Paula Tallal (Temporal spectral deficits)

71. Dyslexia Categorical perception difficulty
Reading ability is significantly lower
Difficulty perceiving consonant contrasts
Confuse sounds phonetically similar
May have deficits in processing the temporal order of acoustic information (difficulty identifying phonemes and judging the order in which the phonemes are heard)
Difficulty segmenting, discriminating and identifying speech sounds

72. Types of Dyslexia
Developmental phonological dyslexia - difficulty with nonword reading.
Changing the initial and middle letters of a word.
Examples are mana (mama) and aufo (auto).
Developmental surface dyslexia - difficulty in reading irregular words.
25% English words are irregular, which means that they violate English spelling-to-sound word rule.
Examples: pretty, bowl, and sew.

73. Etiology of Dyslexia Heredity: Family gene carries the disorder
Studies have shown that males are four times more likely to have a reading disorder than a female;
However, perhaps a male’s behavior contributes to this as it brings forth the disorder to a teacher’s attention more easily.
Perhaps females can more readily compensate

74. Etiology of Dyslexia Environment: Limited English vocabulary
English as second language students.
Difficulty understanding phonemics.
Children of poverty
Children with parents with low reading levels
Students with speech or hearing impairments

75. Articulatory Problems
Categorized into subgroups:
1. Those with speech perception difficulties
2. Those with normal speech perception
Subjects asked to identify words that contrasted phonemes /s/ and /S/. In this test, a subgroup of articulation-disordered children were unable to identify the test stimuli appropriately (seat vs. sheet).
Subjects asked to identify words that contrasted the phonemes /s/ and /theta/, In words sick and thick, and none of the articulation-disordered children were able to identify these words appropriately whereas children without disorder could.
Important to assess speech perception abilities prior to initiating articulation therapy
Rvachew S & Jamieson DG. (1989). Perception of voiceless fricatives by children with a functional articulation disorder. J Speech Hear Disord.; 54(2):

76. Reading Disorders
Difficultly reading or understanding material within a reading.
Most have problems with their phonemic (sound/symbol relationships) awareness development.
Have difficult time putting together letters to make a sound.