Study of pyoverdine type and production by Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolated from cystic fibrosis patients: prevalence of type II pyoverdine isolates and accumulation of pyoverdine-negative mutations.

The lungs of cystic fibrosis patients are frequently colonized by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which produces high-affinity fluorescent peptidic siderophores, pyoverdines. Three pyoverdines which differ in their peptide chain and are easily differentiated by isoelectric focusing exist, only one being produced by a given strain. P. aeruginosa isolates from cystic fibrosis patients of a German hospital were analyzed by sequential, pulse-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and for pyoverdine production and type. Only producers of type I and type II pyoverdine were found. There was a perfect correlation between the type of pyoverdine produced and the clonality determined by PFGE. PFGE clone C, the most prevalent among cystic fibrosis patients, and found in an aquatic environment, produced type II pyoverdine. Pyoverdine-negative mutants seemed to increase as a function of the lung colonization time, but retained the capacity to take up pyoverdines. Most isolates that took up type II pyoverdine were also able to utilize type I pyoverdine as judged by growth stimulation experiments. No correlation was observed between the loss of pyoverdine production and mucoidy.

Word recognition performance in various background competitors.

Word recognition performance was measured for 18 normal-hearing subjects using the female talker version of the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6) in the presence of three background competitors: (1) a meaningful multitalker competing message consisting of three male and three female talkers (forward multitalker competing message [FCM]), (2) the same multitalker competing message recorded in reverse to eliminate semantic content (backward multitalker competing message [BCM]), and (3) an amplitude-modulated speech-spectrum noise (SSN) having the same long-term average spectrum and amplitude fluctuations as the meaningful multitalker competing message. The meaningful competitor had a significantly more deleterious effect on recognition performance compared to performance for the two nonmeaningful competitors. Furthermore, the nonmeaningful speech competitor produced a significantly greater degradation in performance than that for the SSN.

Magnitude estimation of degraded speech quality by normal- and impaired-hearing listeners.

Speech quality magnitude estimates (SQME's) were obtained from 12 sensorineurally impaired-hearing listeners on connected speech samples degraded by changing low-pass filter cutoff frequency, high-pass filter cutoff frequency, or percent total harmonic distortion (THD) by linear rectification. Log SQME's varied linearly with log bandwidth for filtered signals and with log percent undegraded (100-% THD) for linearly rectified signals. Significant variations were found among the slopes of the log-log functions for degradation modes and group-by-degradation mode interactions. Slope differences appeared to represent differential sensitivity of the listeners to changes in mode and degree of degradation. The findings are sufficiently encouraging to suggest that direct scaling procedures be employed in future studies of the evaluation of communication systems and the perception of complex signals.

Cost-benefit analysis of two decision criteria for spondee threshold measurements.

Normal-hearing subjects were tested and retested using two spondee threshold criteria: a strict 50 percent correct rule and a 50 percent or 75 percent correct (or both) rule. The 50 percent criterion produced lower thresholds at the cost of poorer test-retest reliability and longer test durations. Both decision rules gave lower threshold SPL values and required less testing time during the second trial. A proposed benefit-cost ratio model indicated that the 50 percent or 75 percent (or both) decision rule gives a better return on the investment of clinical effort.