Search Results Within Category "Ear, Nose & Throat"

The purpose of this study is to better understand how people hear sounds and understand speech, especially in noisy environments. Researchers are studying how hearing and speech perception change across adulthood in people with and without hearing loss. Information learned from this study may help improve hearing aids and other approaches used to support communication for individuals with hearing difficulties.

This study looks at how the brain processes speech in different listening situations, like when multiple people are talking at the same time or when there’s background noise.

This study is about understanding how subglottic stenosis (narrowing within the airway) affects voice, speech, and breathing sounds. Changes in airflow from airway narrowing can alter how the voice sounds, how speech is timed, and how breaths are taken during speaking. By using advanced, noninvasive sound analysis, we hope to identify patterns that may help detect airway narrowing earlier and track improvement after treatment.

This study aims to test the accuracy and speed of the pABR for future clinical use by recruiting infants and adults with a range of hearing loss profiles from normal hearing to severe loss.

This is a study of adults with unexplained chronic cough between 18-80 years old. This study is trying to determine whether a noninvasive vibrotactile stimulation device can help reduce cough symptoms.

This study is about assessing compliance, satisfaction, and usability of a take-home device for tinnitus management, specifically a bimodal neuromodulation device using customized acoustic stimulation paired with electrical ear stimulation. This study also examines whether integrative health (IH) practices – such as deep breathing – paired with bimodal neuromodulation can enhance long-term plasticity of the brain and reduce stress.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how listeners take advantage of visual cues to support speech perception during conversations. Experiments will characterize these gaze strategies, describe how they vary with hearing ability and conversational context, and examine how differences in gaze behavior relate to listening effort during conversation.

This study is testing whether a tool called High-Resolution Manometry can help diagnose a voice condition called laryngeal dystonia (also known as spasmodic dysphonia) and track how well treatment is working. High-Resolution Manometry is a test that measures pressure in your throat using a small, flexible tube. The procedure is brief and designed to be as comfortable as possible. Researchers think that people with laryngeal dystonia may have different pressure patterns in their throat compared to people without the condition or with other voice problems like muscle tension dysphonia. If this tool can help identify laryngeal dystonia earlier, it may allow patients to get the right treatment sooner.

Researchers from UMN's Auditory Perception and Cognition Lab are looking for volunteers for a study to better understand hearing loss and help improve diagnoses and treatment.

This study involves testing auditory and speech perception using behavioral and non-invasive physiological measures in humans.

The purpose of this research is to understand the effort needed to understand speech if hearing is impaired. Listening effort is higher in people with hearing impairment and has wide-ranging negative consequences across many aspects of a person’s life. The goal of this project is to explore factors that make listening effortful, with special focus on the need to repair perceptual mistakes by relying on context.

The purpose of this study is to learn more about the origin of tinnitus (phantom sound) and how age and hearing loss affect the ability to hear simple and complex sounds, such as tones and speech, presented in isolation and in the presence of other competing sounds. Possible participants may have normal hearing or mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Participants will be seated in a sound-treated room and listen to sounds over headphones, insert earphones (earbuds), or via loudspeakers. The tasks involve making judgments about the sounds, such as discriminating which of two sounds appeared to fluctuate in intensity or reporting the words in a sentence.

We are investigating how paired non-invasive electrical stimulation of surface body regions and sound changes sound perception and tinnitus. Body stimulation regions include: external ear/behind the ear, shoulder, neck, forearm, hand, and upper arm. We aim to better understand the optimal conditions of this paired stimulation, which opens opportunities for applying this method to improving hearing loss or tinnitus. We are studying three groups of people: those with normal hearing, those with mild to moderate hearing loss, and those with tinnitus.

Paired sound and electrical stimulation can alter how the brain encodes sounds and the perception of sounds, as shown in emerging evidence from animal studies. The aim of this study is to develop measures for paired stimulation that can be used reliably. These measures assess the following aspects of hearing: basic hearing sensitivity and cochlear health, perception of loudness and pitch, and perception of speech and other complex sounds. This will lead to a greater understanding in the hearing science community about how multisensory stimulation can alter activity in the auditory system and sound perception, which may lead to new techniques for improving hearing disorders.