This article documents a strength-based understanding of how individuals who are deaf maximize their social and professional potential. This exploratory study was conducted with 49 adult participants who are deaf (n = 30) and who have typical hearing (n = 19) residing in America, Australia, England, and South Africa. The findings support a…

Recent advances in videoconferencing technology have resulted in a substantial increase in the use of live videoconferencing--referred to here as telepractice--to diagnose and treat speech, language, and hearing disorders. There is growing support from professional organizations for use of this service delivery model, as videoconferencing…

This article presents a systematic and comprehensive framework of proactive psychosocial attributes and tactics that individuals who are deaf use to maximize their professional and social potential. Empirical studies regarding deafness appear to lack such a framework which may be due to how the research is conducted. A framework of proactive…

While the concurrent use of the hearing aid (HA) microphone with frequency modulation (FM) technology can decrease speech-recognition performance, the FM+HA condition is still an important setting for users of both HA and FM technology. The primary goal of this investigation was to evaluate the effect of attenuating HA gain in the FM+HA listening…

An individual over age 18 can purchase a hearing aid online or through mail order if they sign a waiver declining a medical evaluation, while those under 18 are required to be seen by a physician to obtain medical consent. However, in many states there is nothing to prevent a parent or caregiver from purchasing hearing aids for their child from a…

This investigation sought to answer two questions: (1) Do children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) by 3;0 (years; months) improve speech intelligibility significantly during their third year of cochlear implant use? (2) How do the intelligibility scores of young CI recipients compare to those reported in the literature for children who receive…

This study examined the benefits of the combined used of a hearing aid and tactual aid to supplement lip-reading in the reception of speech and for the recognition of environmental sounds in an adult with profound hearing loss. Speech conditions included lip-reading alone (L), lip-reading + tactual aid (L+TA) lip-reading + hearing aid (L+HA) and…

Gentamicin is an aminoglycoside antibiotic that has been a mainstay in pediatric care for decades. Although new antibiotics are constantly under development, gentamicin continues to play an important role in clinical medicine. Although this may be surprising in the context of evidence of an association with hearing loss, both on a toxicity and a…

Aminoglycoside antibiotics, commonly prescribed for adults and children to treat a wide range of bacterial infections, are potentially ototoxic, often causing irreversible damage to the auditory and vestibular systems. Ototoxic hearing loss usually begins at the higher frequencies and can progress to lower frequencies necessary for understanding…

Using electopalatography, this study investigated the production of sibilants produced by four adults who have severe-to-profound hearing loss and four speakers with normal hearing. Each speaker wore a Rion[R] semi-flexible electroplate while producing multiple repetitions of the utterances "see, sue, she, shoe." The speakers' productions were…

Two online tasks (an auditory same-different task and an auditory lexical decision task) examined the use of phonotactic information by 18 adults with cochlear implants. Cochlear implant patients with better word recognition abilities produced patterns of results similar to results obtained from listeners with normal hearing. (Contains…

An error analysis of the word recognition responses of 20 adult cochlear implant users and 19 typical listeners was conducted to determine the types of partial information used when they identified spoken words under auditory-alone and audiovisual conditions. Results indicate there were no significant interactions with hearing status. (Contains…

A study investigated perception of elliptical speech in an adult cochlear implant patient. Two experiments were conducted using sets of meaningful and anomalous English sentences: one set contained correct place of articulation cues, the other was transformed into elliptical speech. The patient and controls labeled the sentences as the same.…

This article provides an overview of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL), the leading cause of occupationally induced hearing loss in industrialized countries. It discusses causes of NIHL and compelling evidence that reactive oxygen metabolites and cochlear hypoprefusion are responsible for the destruction of cochlear hair cells. Prevention is also…

A study analyzed frequency of occurrence of consonants, vowels, and diphthongs, syllabic structure of the words, and segmental structure of the 311 monosyllabic words of 500 words that occur most frequently in English. Three mannerisms of articulation accounted for nearly 75 percent of all consonant occurrences: stops, semi-vowels, and nasals.…