1985 — 1999 |
Watson, Charles S |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Discrimination and Identification of Auditory Patterns @ Indiana University Bloomington
The remarkable ability of the human auditory system to extract meaning from continuous human speech can be more fully understood in relation to listeners' abilities to "hear out" the details of complex sounds in general. The proposal research will determine the limits of auditory discrimination and identification abilities of normal listeners for a variety of complex sounds. These experiments first extend earlier work with tonal patterns and develop a more recent line of investigation with spectrally complex sounds. The proposed studies with tonal patterns are divided into three categories, each addressing a basic issue in the discrimination or identification of complex sounds. These are 1) the ability to discriminate between complex patterns with various types of spectral and temporal microstructure; 2) the ability to recognize relational properties that form the invariant that define a pattern under various types of transformations; and 3) the ability to resolve pattern detail under different levels of pattern uncertainty (or familiarity). A second series of experiments will investigate the generality of the proportion-of-the-total-duration (PTD) rule, which has been shown to be a remarkably strong predictor of the deductibility of changes in components of a variety of unfamiliar complex sounds. Two recent theoretical model for the discrimination of complex sounds, one based on informational content and the other on the physical properties of the stimulus are able t o predict the general form of the PTD-rule results. Experiments will be conducted to determine which of these models provides the more comprehensive account of the ability to resolve the details of complex sounds. A third series of experiments will determine the abilities of listeners to resolve the details of dynamically varying, spectrally complex sounds, using non-speech stimuli that include some of the properties of speech. These studies will investigate the effects of various types of spectral complexity, including a new class of experiments on listeners' abilities to recognize the characteristics of complex filters. An improved version of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities will also be developed.
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1 |
1986 — 1989 |
Elbert, Mary (co-PI) [⬀] Watson, Charles Maki, Daniel (co-PI) [⬀] Kewley-Port, Diane (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Indiana Speech Training Aid (Istra)
This research project is concerned with the application of speech recognition technology to the development of a speech training aid to help in teaching hearing impaired children to speak intellegibly. The research team involves people in speech recognition, speech analysis and speech therapy. The aim is to develop an inexpensive, personal computer-based speech training device to be used by schools and speech clinics.
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0.915 |
1999 — 2002 |
Watson, Charles S |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Individual Differences in Auditory Abilities @ Indiana University Bloomington
There is an urgent need for a systematic study of the nature, range, and especially the consequences of individual differences in auditory abilities, in adults and children. Recent studies of the hearing of complex sounds have revealed as remarkable range of individual differences in auditory abilities. Assumptions about the significance of these differential abilities have influenced diagnostic practices and have justified widely marketed commercial therapy systems for the correction of auditory perceptual deficits. Support is requested for comprehensive studies of the auditory abilities of 800 adult listeners with normal pure-tone sensitivity, and for the auditory component of an ongoing cross-disciplinary study of 460 children in the first four grades of school (the Benton-IU Project). The research with adult listeners will employ an improved and extended version of the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC), plus a range of additional speech and nonspeech tasks. The research with children is a collaboration between optometrists, psychologists, and specialists in child language development, using the most comprehensive set of measures of sensory, cognitive, and linguistic abilities ever employed in an epidemiological/longitudinal study. Results of preliminary studies, assure that this research will provide valid and extremely cost-efficient answers to the basic questions: What are the major dimensions of auditory abilities?, and What are the consequences of deficits in those abilities for speech perception, language learning and reading? If warranted by the data collected with this test battery , a one-hour screening test will be developed to identify children with significant auditory perceptual deficits. Because the project is certain to identify subgroups of listeners with both unusually acute and unusually poor auditory abilities, selected subgroups of listeners will be further investigated using psychophysical and physiological measures, including additional spectral and temporal tests, extended training, early, middle and late evoked responses, cochlear emissions, and PET (and possibly FMRI) images obatined during auditory processing.
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1 |
2000 — 2002 |
Watson, Charles Humes, Larry (co-PI) [⬀] Humes, Larry (co-PI) [⬀] Kidd, Gary Kewley-Port, Diane (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Acquisition of Acoustical Instrumentation and Computer Systems For Research in Hearing and Speech Sciences
Kidd 0079468
This proposal seeks funds to equip two laboratories to be used as shared resources for a wide range of experiments in speech and hearing sciences. The two facilities are: (1) the Multi-station Auditory-Visual Laboratory (MAV Lab) and (2) the Anechoic-Echoic Laboratory (AEL). Both laboratories are to be equipped with networked computers with flexible experiment-control software for stimulus presentation and data collection. The MAV Lab will also serve as a general purpose multi-station testing facility for evaluation of speech and language abilities and for speech recording. The requested equipment will allow a very productive group of researchers to conduct a wider range of research with much greater efficiency.
The Multi-station Auditory-Visual Laboratory (AM FLab) will be constructed to house up to ten study participants in two large double-walled, sound-treated booths that will permit computer presentation of auditory and visual stimuli at each of ten independent testing stations. The large sound-treated rooms will enable threshold-level sound intensities to be presented via headphones in various experiments while concurrently allowing for the testing of up to ten participants simultaneously. The use of two separate booths in this space will provide more flexibility in the use and scheduling of the facilities. Each testing station will be equipped with a 17" highresolution color monitor, keyboard and mouse, as well as a microphone for voice recording. These components from each testing station will be connected to separate Pentium III, 600-MHZ computers with accompanying electronic equipment needed for sophisticated listening experiments (programmable attenuators with >96 dB signal-to-noise ratios; multi-channel, 16bit, digital-to-analog converters with signal-processing array processors). The ten computers (one per testing station) will be housed in a separate room outside the double-walled booth to minimize internally generated noise in the test area. The MAV Lab will enable state-of-the-art testing in the areas of auditory perception, speech perception, visual perception, combined auditory-visual perception, language development, and general cognitive function.
The Anechoic-Echoic Laboratory (AEL) will be housed in a facility that was refurbished by Indiana University approximately seven years ago. It is a unique facility with a large anechoic chamber immediately adjacent to an equally large echoic room, both specially constructed to eliminate outside noise and vibration. The facility, however, has seen very little use because of the lack of appropriate test equipment. This proposal requests funds to equip both the anechoic and echoic chambers with a computer-based stimulus-delivery and response-collection system, a computer dedicated for use in making complex acoustical measurements. A computer-controlled loudspeaker system that will permit precise, quiet movement of a loudspeaker at specified velocities along a circular path surrounding the human listener will be installed in the anechoic chamber. This system will be used to study the localization of sound, the perception of speech in background noise under real-world conditions, and the perception of the movement of sound sources in space.
These two facilities will be used by several investigators in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and their colleagues in other departments at Indiana University and at other universities. Several of the investigators will use the facilities for multidisciplinary projects that include a wide range of populations (e.g., infants, grade-school children, young adults, and the elderly) and many different disciplines (including physics, engineering, and architectural acoustics). These new laboratories will also provide state-of-the-art facilities for research training of students in Speech and Hearing Sciences. Additionally, the special capabilities of the AEL will be used for collaborative research with hearing aid manufacturers and engineers in the evaluation of new directional microphone technologies.
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0.915 |
2004 |
Watson, Charles S |
R43Activity Code Description: To support projects, limited in time and amount, to establish the technical merit and feasibility of R&D ideas which may ultimately lead to a commercial product(s) or service(s). |
Automatic Evaluation of Speech Quality @ Communication Disorders Technology
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Tests of several different approaches to the automatic evaluation of the quality of speech segments are proposed. Previous systems for use in pronunciation training have typically employed either automatic speech-recognition (ASR) technology, or have used templates based on a limited number of utterances rated as excellent by L1 listeners (and sometimes also employing a second set of utterances containing a common pronunciation error). Here speech-processing technologies (HMM's and ANN's) will be developed specifically for use as evaluation systems (not recognition systems) to predict quality and locus-of-error judgments assigned by listeners. Termed the "evaluation-of-single-words" (ESW) approach, the special feature of these systems will derive from the training tokens employed in their development: multiple recordings of a single word made by groups of native and non-native talkers. Sixty talkers will be native speakers of Arabic, whose intelligibility in English ranges from poor to near-perfect, and 60 talkers will be native speakers of middle-American English. There will be twelve words divided between one, two, and three syllables. Ten productions of each word will be recorded by each talker, yielding 14,400 tokens. Each token will be rated by listening juries for pronunciation quality, and the tokens will also be categorized into perceptual clusters, using MDS and cluster-analysis techniques. At least two computer-based evaluation systems (HMM and ANN) will be trained for each individual word, with the goals of predicting overall pronunciation quality and identifying specific commonly occurring pronunciation errors. It is expected that these word-specific systems, each representing a discrete "evaluator" custom-built for an individual word, will approach the maximum accuracy that can be expected of this class of processors. If successful, the ESW approach may have a broad range of applications in pronunciation training, identification of a speaker's L1, foreign-language instruction, and other non-lexical applications. However, our specific goal is the development of systems that can provide informative feedback during automated pronunciation training. In ASR applications, the goal is to respond the same way to a word, no matter how it is pronounced. The goal of an ESW system is to respond differentially to pronunciation variants. This distinction between ASR and ESW is central to the development of successful evaluation systems as it dictates different modeling constraints.
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0.916 |
2009 |
Watson, Charles S |
R43Activity Code Description: To support projects, limited in time and amount, to establish the technical merit and feasibility of R&D ideas which may ultimately lead to a commercial product(s) or service(s). |
Telephone Screening Test For Hearing Using Three-Digit Sequences in Noise. @ Communication Disorders Technology, Inc
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will develop a speech-recognition test in noise (SRTn) for use as a screening test for hearing disability, suitable for delivery over the telephone. Successful development and implementation of such a test has the potential to greatly increase awareness of hearing disorders and the numbers of persons with hearing impairment who seek services. The test will be based on the National Hearing Test that has been used for the past four years in the Netherlands. The scientists who developed that test, and who subsequently consulted with UK scientists in developing an English version (also now in use), have agreed to participate in the development of a version of the test with speech materials spoken in a Middle American dialect. The test employs spoken sequences of three single-syllable digits, presented in a background noise with a speech-shaped spectrum. The threshold is determined by an adaptive tracking procedure. This test, administered by home telephone, has been shown to be strongly correlated with average pure-tone thresholds and even more strongly with sentence recognition in noise. The sensitivity and selectivity of the three-digit telephone test as a measure of clinically significant hearing disability were 0.91 and 0.93, respectively, for disability defined by performance on sentence recognition in noise. In the first year of its availability in the Netherlands over 100,000 people elected to take this test. This represented a large increase in the total proportion of hearing-impaired persons who have had a hearing test (historically, only one in five in the US). The US version of the test will be developed, using three-digit sequences recorded by a native speaker of Middle American English. Thresholds will then be determined by telephone, for a set of approximately 50 hearing impaired and 20 normal hearing persons, using an adaptive tracking procedure. Pure-tone thresholds and standardized speech discrimination tests administered to these same listeners will be used to determine whether the high correlations between the telephone test and measures obtained in the clinic, as found in the Netherlands, can also be achieved with a US version of this test. Sensitivity and selectivity values for the test will be determined for the identification of persons with clinically significant pure-tone loss and for those with reduced speech discrimination in noise. An estimated 28 million US citizens have impaired hearing, and approximately half of them are under age 50 (NIDCD, 1996). Successful implementation of such a test in the US could greatly increase both the awareness of hearing disorders and the numbers of persons benefitting from hearing aids and other treatments. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The goal of this project is to develop and validate a telephone-based screening test for impaired hearing, modeled after the highly successful National Hearing Tests currently in use in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It is estimated that roughly 80% of the 28 million hearing-impaired persons in the US who could benefit from hearing aids have never had their hearing tested. An inexpensive, reliable, and extremely convenient test is likely to be taken by many people who suspect that they have impaired hearing but have hesitated to visit a hearing professional for testing.
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0.916 |
2010 — 2015 |
Watson, Charles S |
R21Activity Code Description: To encourage the development of new research activities in categorical program areas. (Support generally is restricted in level of support and in time.) R33Activity Code Description: The R33 award is to provide a second phase for the support for innovative exploratory and development research activities initiated under the R21 mechanism. Although only R21 awardees are generally eligible to apply for R33 support, specific program initiatives may establish eligibility criteria under which applications could be accepted from applicants demonstrating progress equivalent to that expected under R33. |
Multi-Site Study of Speech Perception Training For Hearing-Aid Users @ Communication Disorders Technology, Inc
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Between 25 and 35% of the adults in the US who could benefit from hearing aids, as many as 25,000,000 persons, either refuse to consider those devices or reject them after a trial. Many of those who try to use hearing aids decide that they are not able to understand speech well enough with them to justify their cost. While developments in hearing-aid technology have improved this situation, recent research suggests another answer. It is that speech perception training may improve recognition abilities to the point that otherwise unsuccessful hearing-aid users can become successful. Several research groups, including our own, have reported statistically significant improvements in speech recognition as a result of various types of training. But none have answered three vital questions. (1) How great an improvement in speech recognition can be achieved through prolonged systematic training? (2) How many hours of training are required to approach that limit? (3) What are the optimal training materials for successful speech recognition training: spoken phrases and sentences, the constituent parts of speech, or both speech parts and wholes? The proposed project, conducted at six major centers for auditory research and clinical service, will address these questions through an intensive speech perception training study of hearing-aid users. Training will be done using the Speech Perception Assessment and Training System (SPATS), which has been developed and tested over the past eight years. SPATS combines the training of over 100 of the most common syllable constituents of spoken English (onsets, nuclei and codas) with training on the recognition of meaningful sentences. Clinical trials with both hearing-aid and cochlear-implant users have shown improved post-training scores on speech recognition tests, following 12 to 24 hours of SPATS training, similar to results reported for other systems. Those data, together with evidence from non-speech auditory training research, suggest that clinically important gains would be made if the training continued for a total of 30-40 hours. While this amount of training may be considered an impossible demand to make of hearing-impaired persons, it is less forbidding when compared to the time devoted to learning many other skills. In 30- 40 hours a piano student can play a few scales and may have mastered her first elementary piece using two hands, an amputee who will eventually become a skier has managed to walk across a room, and a foreign-language student has learned to read a very simple story, slowly. Speech perception training for hearing-aid users should not be rejected out of hand because 30-40 hours of training does not fit the model of current clinical practice. If major improvements in speech reception by the hearing-aid user can be shown to be achievable through such training, many users would elect to make that effort and be willing to pay for it. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Approximately twenty-five million US citizens with hearing impairment have either tried a hearing aid and decided against using it, or have not tried one because they do not believe it would help them enough to justify the cost. Recent research suggests that extended speech perception training can turn some unsuccessful hearing-aid users into successful ones. To test this hypothesis, extended speech perception training of hearing aid users will be undertaken for the first time, at each of six major centers for research and treatment of hearing disorders.
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0.916 |
2013 |
Watson, Charles S |
R44Activity Code Description: To support in - depth development of R&D ideas whose feasibility has been established in Phase I and which are likely to result in commercial products or services. SBIR Phase II are considered 'Fast-Track' and do not require National Council Review. |
A National Screening Test For Hearing, Administered by Telephone. @ Communication Disorders Technology, Inc
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An estimated 36 million US citizens have impaired hearing, but only one in five has had a hearing test. As noted by a recent NIDCD Working Group, In the US there are no readily accessible low-cost hearing screening programs. The authors of this proposal, in collaboration with scientists from Indiana University & VU University Medical Center of Amsterdam, have developed and validated a low-cost screening test for hearing disability, for administration by telephone. This test is based on one that has been available for the past seven years in the Netherlands, versions of which are now in use in the UK, Australia, France, and Germany, and are being developed in several other countries. Validity of the US test has been demonstrated in studies conducted at the Indiana University Hearing Clinic and in cooperation with the Veterans Administration. This project will determine the kind and extent of marketing needed to insure substantial usage of the test and the kind and extent of follow-up needed to insure that those who fail it seek professional hearing services. In Year 1 the test will be launched in two metropolitan areas. In one it will be mainly publicized through mass media; in the other through presentations to local organizations. Interested persons will be directed to a website, where the test will be explained, and they will be invited t take the test for a fee of $4.00. The fee will support the cost of administering the test to right nd left ears, the collection and analysis of demographic information from each person tested, the cost of follow-up, and the cost of publicizing the test either through mass media, such as the AARP Magazine and local newspapers, radio and television; or through presentations to service organizations such as the Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, retirement homes, labor unions, and religious organizations. Net program income during this project will be devoted to the expansion of the areas in which the test is available and the refinement of methods of publicizing the test. Based on Year 1 results, marketing plans will be implemented in additional metropolitan areas in Year 2. If the US response rates are similar to those reported in the Netherlands and the UK, between 1.5 and 2.0 million persons could eventually be tested annually in the US. The two differences between this test and the large number of free tests advertised by hearing aid dealers and manufacturers are that (1) it has been proven to be a valid screening test in extensive clinical testing and (2) it is made available by a consortium of two universities and a test- development company, none of which have any financial connections to the hearing aid industry and thus have no conflict of interest in the test outcomes.
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0.916 |
2014 |
Watson, Charles S |
R44Activity Code Description: To support in - depth development of R&D ideas whose feasibility has been established in Phase I and which are likely to result in commercial products or services. SBIR Phase II are considered 'Fast-Track' and do not require National Council Review. |
A National Screening Test For Hearing Administered by Telephone @ Communication Disorders Technology, Inc
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An estimated 36 million US citizens have impaired hearing, but only one in five has had a hearing test. As noted by a recent NIDCD Working Group, In the US there are no readily accessible low-cost hearing screening programs. The authors of this proposal, in collaboration with scientists from Indiana University & VU University Medical Center of Amsterdam, have developed and validated a low-cost screening test for hearing disability, for administration by telephone. This test is based on one that has been available for the past seven years in the Netherlands, versions of which are now in use in the UK, Australia, France, and Germany, and are being developed in several other countries. Validity of the US test has been demonstrated in studies conducted at the Indiana University Hearing Clinic and in cooperation with the Veterans Administration. This project will determine the kind and extent of marketing needed to insure substantial usage of the test and the kind and extent of follow-up needed to insure that those who fail it seek professional hearing services. In Year 1 the test will be launched in two metropolitan areas. In one it will be mainly publicized through mass media; in the other through presentations to local organizations. Interested persons will be directed to a website, where the test will be explained, and they will be invited t take the test for a fee of $4.00. The fee will support the cost of administering the test to right nd left ears, the collection and analysis of demographic information from each person tested, the cost of follow-up, and the cost of publicizing the test either through mass media, such as the AARP Magazine and local newspapers, radio and television; or through presentations to service organizations such as the Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, retirement homes, labor unions, and religious organizations. Net program income during this project will be devoted to the expansion of the areas in which the test is available and the refinement of methods of publicizing the test. Based on Year 1 results, marketing plans will be implemented in additional metropolitan areas in Year 2. If the US response rates are similar to those reported in the Netherlands and the UK, between 1.5 and 2.0 million persons could eventually be tested annually in the US. The two differences between this test and the large number of free tests advertised by hearing aid dealers and manufacturers are that (1) it has been proven to be a valid screening test in extensive clinical testing and (2) it is made available by a consortium of two universities and a test- development company, none of which have any financial connections to the hearing aid industry and thus have no conflict of interest in the test outcomes.
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0.916 |
2019 |
Watson, Charles S |
R21Activity Code Description: To encourage the development of new research activities in categorical program areas. (Support generally is restricted in level of support and in time.) |
Efficient Estimation of Auditory Sensitivity and Cognitive Status Using Spoken-Digit Tests. @ Communication Disorders Technology, Inc
Project Summary/Abstract. Untreated age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is the most prevalent cause of reduced quality of life for persons 55 and older in the US. There are 30+ million hearing-impaired adults in this country, many of whom have never had a hearing test. One reason is the lack of convenient, inexpensive and valid hearing tests that are available to both individuals and hearing professionals. The goal of this project is to develop a family of tests of auditory sensitivity and of related cognitive status that together measure functional hearing loss. If such tests were widely available large numbers of those who suspect they may have hearing loss would take them. This was demonstrated by over 3000 calls in a single day to the telephone-administered National Hearing Test (NHT), without commercial promotion, only in response to a few newspaper articles. The identification of spoken three-digit sequences in a noise background, as used in the NHT, has been shown to correlate strongly with traditional pure-tone measures of hearing loss. Digit-in-noise (DIN) tests have recently been shown to be particularly efficient for screening, since they are reliable, convenient, and require neither sound booths nor highly trained personnel for their administration. A family of DIN tests will be designed to help distinguish poor speech recognition due to sensitivity loss from poor recognition that reflects reduced cognitive processing. The tests will be implemented on smartphones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers with Android or iOS operating systems. The NHT developed earlier for landline phones (Watson et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2014), has been taken by nearly 130,000 callers since 2014. Those data, plus audiograms from 700+ adults (veterans) who were given the DIN test together with other standard audiometry, will guide test development. Optional spoken rather than keypad responses will make the test accessible to children and to elderly adults with motor-control problems. Validation studies will test 590 participants in three university hearing centers. DIN sensitivity tests will be validated in relation to pure-tone audiograms, while cognitive-status tests will be compared to established tests of working memory, executive function, and selective attention. Audiogram slope will be estimated by comparing DIN-test performance using low-frequency masking noise, to that with speech-spectrum noise. This new family of tests on a variety of platforms, will be designed for use in the home, in schools, in primary-care physicians? offices, in hearing clinics and in noisy businesses. Widespread use of this family of screening tests can make personal knowledge of hearing health as accessible as weighing oneself on the bathroom scale.
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0.916 |