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Papers by Stuart Rosen

International Journal of Audiology, 2019

Objective: The Speech in Babble (SiB) test assesses the perception of speech in noise in UK adult... more Objective: The Speech in Babble (SiB) test assesses the perception of speech in noise in UK adults. Here we define the normal range of SiB scores to enable the use of the test in clinic. Design: In each test, 25 monosyllabic words were played in background multi-talker babble. Listeners had to repeat the word they heard. An adaptive procedure was used to determine the Signal to Noise Ratio needed to reach 50% correct responses (i.e., the Speech Reception Threshold). Eight distinct equivalent lists were available. Study sample: Sixty-nine normal-hearing adults (aged 20-57 years) with no reported listening difficulties participated in the study and completed the SiB test twice in both ears. Results: Normative SiB scores varied from-0.8 dB to 3.7 dB suggesting that patients outside these limits should be considered as having abnormal scores. No statistically significant difference between ears and no effect of age or sex was found. There was 'fair' test-retest reliability. Conclusion: The SiB test is a short, valid and reliable test that can be used in UK clinics, e.g. as part of a standard APD battery or evaluating the performance of hearing impaired patients.

Many children have difficulties understanding speech. Reliable tools are needed to identify them ... more Many children have difficulties understanding speech. Reliable tools are needed to identify them in order to provide appropriate interventions. At present, there are relatively few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception that have normative data from UK children. Here we present a new test, which evaluates children’s ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This new test of single word perception is (1) tailored to testing young children, (2) has minimal memory demands, (3) adapts to the child’s ability and (4) does not require reading or verbal output. Although designed for young children, it is also readily applicable in adults. Here, we show that speech in noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around ten years of age. We make this test freely available, with normative data for li...

This document presents Practice Guidance by the British Society of Audiology (BSA). This Practice... more This document presents Practice Guidance by the British Society of Audiology (BSA). This Practice Guidance represents, to the best knowledge of the BSA, the evidence-base and consensus on good practice, given the stated methodology and scope of the document and at the time of publication. Although care has been taken in preparing the information supplied by the BSA, the BSA does not and cannot guarantee the interpretation and application of it. The BSA cannot be held responsible for any errors or omissions, and the BSA accepts no liability whatsoever for any loss or damage howsoever arising. This document supersedes any previous recommended procedure by the BSA and stands until superseded or withdrawn by the BSA.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Mar 1, 2023

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Dec 1, 2019

The effects of musicality and language background on cue integration in pitch perception

International Journal of Audiology, Jul 15, 2019

Purpose: Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessme... more Purpose: Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception with normative data from UK children. We present a new test that evaluates children's ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This task is (1) tailored to testing young children, but also readily applicable to adults, (2) has minimal memory demands, (3) adapts to the child's ability and (4) does not require reading or verbal output. Method: We tested 155 children and young adults aged from 5 to 25 years of age on this new test of single word perception. Results: Speech in noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around nine years of age. Conclusions: We make this test freely available and provide associated normative data. We hope that it will be useful to researchers and clinicians in the assessment of speech perception abilities in children that are hard of hearing, have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), dyslexia or Auditory Processing Disorder (APD).

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Feb 1, 2016

The purpose of the study was to assess the ability of children with developmental language learni... more The purpose of the study was to assess the ability of children with developmental language learning impairments (LLIs) to use visual speech cues from the talking face. In this cross-sectional study, 41 typically developing children (mean age: 8 years 0 months, range: 4 years 5 months to 11 years 10 months) and 27 children with diagnosed LLI (mean age: 8 years 10 months, range: 5 years 2 months to 11 years 6 months) completed a silent speechreading task and a speech-in-noise task with and without visual support from the talking face. The speech-in-noise task involved the identification of a target word in a carrier sentence with a single competing speaker as a masker. Children in the LLI group showed a deficit in speechreading when compared with their typically developing peers. Beyond the single-word level, this deficit became more apparent in older children. On the speech-in-noise task, a substantial benefit of visual cues was found regardless of age or group membership, although the LLI group showed an overall developmental delay in speech perception. Although children with LLI were less accurate than their peers on the speechreading and speech-in noise-tasks, both groups were able to make equivalent use of visual cues to boost performance accuracy when listening in noise.

Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 2021

PURPOSE Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessmen... more PURPOSE Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception with normative data from U.K. children. We present a new test that evaluates children's ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This task (a) is tailored to testing young children, but also readily applicable to adults; (b) has minimal memory demands; (c) adapts to the child's ability; and (d) does not require reading or verbal output. METHOD We tested 155 children and young adults aged from 5 to 25 years on this new test of single word perception. RESULTS Speech-in-noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around 9 years of age. CONCLUSIONS We make this test freely available and provide associated normative data. We hope that it will be useful to rese...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021

When attempting to maintain conversations in noisy communicative settings, talkers typically modi... more When attempting to maintain conversations in noisy communicative settings, talkers typically modify their speech to make themselves understood by the listener. In this study, we investigated the impact of background interference type and talker age on speech adaptations, vocal effort and communicative success. We measured speech acoustics (articulation rate, mid-frequency energy, fundamental frequency), vocal effort (correlation between mid-frequency energy and fundamental frequency) and task completion time in 114 participants aged 8–80 years carrying out an interactive problem-solving task in good and noisy listening conditions (quiet, non-speech noise, background speech). We found greater changes in fundamental frequency and mid-frequency energy in non-speech noise than in background speech and similar reductions in articulation rate in both. However, older participants (50+ years) increased vocal effort in both background interference types, whereas younger children (less than 1...

eLife, 2019

Auditory deprivation in the form of deafness during development leads to lasting changes in centr... more Auditory deprivation in the form of deafness during development leads to lasting changes in central auditory system function. However, less is known about the effects of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (MMHL) during development. Here, we used a longitudinal design to examine late auditory evoked responses and mismatch responses to nonspeech and speech sounds for children with MMHL. At Time 1, younger children with MMHL (8–12 years; n = 23) showed age-appropriate mismatch negativities (MMNs) to sounds, but older children (12–16 years; n = 23) did not. Six years later, we re-tested a subset of the younger (now older) children with MMHL (n = 13). Children who had shown significant MMNs at Time 1 showed MMNs that were reduced and, for nonspeech, absent at Time 2. Our findings demonstrate that even a mild-to-moderate hearing loss during early-to-mid childhood can lead to changes in the neural processing of sounds in late childhood/adolescence.

Frontiers in Neurology, 2019

Cerebral Cortex, 2013

An anterior pathway, concerned with extracting meaning from sound, has been identified in nonhuma... more An anterior pathway, concerned with extracting meaning from sound, has been identified in nonhuman primates. An analogous pathway has been suggested in humans, but controversy exists concerning the degree of lateralization and the precise location where responses to intelligible speech emerge. We have demonstrated that the left anterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) responds preferentially to intelligible speech (Scott SK, Blank CC, Rosen S, Wise RJS. 2000. Identification of a pathway for intelligible speech in the left temporal lobe. Brain. 123:2400-2406.). A functional magnetic resonance imaging study in Cerebral Cortex used equivalent stimuli and univariate and multivariate analyses to argue for the greater importance of bilateral posterior when compared with the left anterior STS in responding to intelligible speech (Okada K, Rong F, Venezia J, Matchin W, Hsieh IH, Saberi K, Serences JT,Hickok G. 2010. Hierarchical organization of human auditory cortex: evidence from acoustic invariance in the response to intelligible speech. 20: 2486-2495.). Here, we also replicate our original study, demonstrating that the left anterior STS exhibits the strongest univariate response and, in decoding using the bilateral temporal cortex, contains the most informative voxels showing an increased response to intelligible speech. In contrast, in classifications using local "searchlights" and a whole brain analysis, we find greater classification accuracy in posterior rather than anterior temporal regions. Thus, we show that the precise nature of the multivariate analysis used will emphasize different response profiles associated with complex sound to speech processing.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Aug 1, 2009

The choice of processing parameters for vocoded signals may have an important effect on the avail... more The choice of processing parameters for vocoded signals may have an important effect on the availability of various auditory features. Experiment 1 varied envelope cutoff frequency ͑30 and 300 Hz͒, carrier type ͑sine and noise͒, and number of bands ͑2-5͒ for vocoded speech presented to normal-hearing listeners. Performance was better with a high cutoff for sine-vocoding, with no effect of cutoff for noise-vocoding. With a low cutoff, performance was better for noise-vocoding than for sine-vocoding. With a high cutoff, performance was better for sine-vocoding. Experiment 2 measured perceptibility of cues to voice pitch variations. A noise carrier combined with a high cutoff allowed intonation to be perceived to some degree but performance was best in high-cutoff sine conditions. A low cutoff led to poorest performance, regardless of carrier. Experiment 3 tested the relative contributions of comodulation across bands and spectral density to improved performance with a sine carrier and high cutoff. Comodulation across bands had no effect so it appears that sidebands providing a denser spectrum improved performance. These results indicate that carrier type in combination with envelope cutoff can alter the available cues in vocoded speech, factors which must be considered in interpreting results with vocoded signals.

Hearing Research, 2021

It is still unclear whether the gradual improvement in amplitude-modulation (AM) sensitivity typi... more It is still unclear whether the gradual improvement in amplitude-modulation (AM) sensitivity typically found in children up to 10 years of age reflects an improvement in "processing efficiency" (the central ability to use information extracted by sensory mechanisms). This hypothesis was tested by evaluating temporal integration for AM, a capacity relying on memory and decision factors. This was achieved by measuring the effect of increasing the number of AM cycles (2 vs 8) on AM-detection thresholds for three groups of children aged from 5 to 11 years and a group of young adults. AM-detection thresholds were measured using a forced-choice procedure and sinusoidal AM (4 or 32 Hz rate) applied to a 1024-Hz pure-tone carrier. All age groups demonstrated temporal integration for AM at both rates; that is, significant improvements in AM sensitivity with a higher number of AM cycles. However, an effect of age is observed as both 5-6 year olds and adults exhibited more temporal integration compared to 7-8 and 10-11 year olds at both rates. This difference is due to: (i) the 5-6 year olds displaying the worst thresholds with 2 AM cycles, but similar thresholds with 8 cycles compared to the 7-8 and 10-11 year olds, and, (ii) adults showing the best thresholds with 8 AM cycles but similar thresholds with 2 cycles compared to the 7-8 and 10-11 year olds. Computational modelling indicated that higher levels of internal noise combined with poorer short-term memory capacities in children accounted for the developmental trends. Improvement in processing efficiency may therefore account for the development of AM detection in childhood. This article is part of the Special Issue Outer hair cell Edited by Joseph Santos-Sacchi and Kumar Navaratnam.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2019

The ability to detect amplitude modulation (AM) is essential to distinguish the spectro-temporal ... more The ability to detect amplitude modulation (AM) is essential to distinguish the spectro-temporal features of speech from those of a competing masker. Previous work shows that AM sensitivity improves until 10 years of age. This may relate to the development of sensory factors (tuning of AM filters, susceptibility to AM masking) or to changes in processing efficiency (reduction in internal noise, optimization of decision strategies). To disentangle these hypotheses, three groups of children (5–11 years) and one of young adults completed psychophysical tasks measuring thresholds for detecting sinusoidal AM (with a rate of 4, 8, or 32 Hz) applied to carriers whose inherent modulations exerted different amounts of AM masking. Results showed that between 5 and 11 years, AM detection thresholds improved and that susceptibility to AM masking slightly increased. However, the effects of AM rate and carrier were not associated with age, suggesting that sensory factors are mature by 5 years. Su...

Psychophysical thresholds were measured for 8-16 year-old children with mild-to-moderate sensorin... more Psychophysical thresholds were measured for 8-16 year-old children with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (MMHL; N = 46) on a battery of auditory processing tasks that included measures designed to be predominantly reliant upon frequency selectivity, and sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) or envelope cues. Children with MMHL who wore hearing aids were tested in both unaided and aided conditions, and all were compared to a group of normally hearing (NH) age-matched controls. Children with MMHL performed more poorly than NH controls on tasks considered to be dependent upon frequency selectivity, sensitivity to TFS, and speech discrimination (/bɑ/-/dɑ/), but not on tasks measuring sensitivity to envelope cues. Auditory processing deficits remained regardless of age, were observed in both unaided and aided conditions, and could not be attributed to differences in nonverbal IQ or attention between groups. However, better auditory processing for children with MMHL was ...

Ear & Hearing, 2019

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the informational component of speech-on-speech masking.... more Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the informational component of speech-on-speech masking. Speech perception in the presence of a competing talker involves not only informational masking (IM) but also a number of masking processes involving interaction of masker and target energy in the auditory periphery. Such peripherally generated masking can be eliminated by presenting the target and masker in opposite ears (dichotically). However, this also reduces IM by providing listeners with lateralization cues that support spatial release from masking (SRM). In tonal sequences, IM can be isolated by rapidly switching the lateralization of dichotic target and masker streams across the ears, presumably producing ambiguous spatial percepts that interfere with SRM. However, it is not clear whether this technique works with speech materials. Design: Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured in 17 young normal-hearing adults for sentences produced by a female talker in the presence...