Multiple-Frequency Matching Treatment Strategy for Tinnitus.

OBJECTIVE: The first aim was to integrate commonly used tinnitus measures into a comprehensive questionnaire. Second, the effectiveness of a masking therapy based on multiple-frequency matching was verified in a clinical study. This study investigated the feasibility of a new treatment strategy for tinnitus, with two main foci. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Compare multiple-frequency matching with traditional masking therapy (Single-frequency matching) through clinical trials. The analysis indicated that the reliability and construct validity of the comprehensive questionnaire need to be improved, and the feasibility of the integration attempt remains uncertain. RESULTS: The clinical results showed that the multiple-frequency matching method was more effective than single-frequency matching for tinnitus treatment. CONCLUSION: The multiple-frequency approach should be used more often with tinnitus masking to promote the patients' recovery.

Assessing the perceptual contributions of level-dependent segments to sentence intelligibility.

The present work assessed the contributions of high root-mean-square (RMS) level (H-level, containing primarily vowels) and middle-RMS-level (M-level, with mostly consonants and vowel-consonant transitions) segments to the intelligibility of noise-masked and noise-suppressed sentences. In experiment 1, noise-masked (by speech-spectrum shaped noise and 6-talker babble) Mandarin sentences were edited to preserve only H- or M-level segments, while replacing the non-target segments with silence. In experiment 2, Mandarin sentences were subjected to four commonly-used single-channel noise-suppression algorithms before generating H-level-only and M-level-only noise-suppressed sentences. To test the influence of an effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on intelligibility, both experiments incorporated a condition in which the SNRs of H-level segments and M-level segments were matched. The processed sentences were presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. Experimental results showed that (1) H-level-only sentences carried more perceptual information than M-level-only sentences under both noise-masked and noise-suppressed conditions; and (2) this intelligibility advantage of H-level-only sentences over M-level-only sentences persisted even when effective SNR levels were matched, and it might be attributed to the perceptual advantage of vowels in speech intelligibility. In addition, the lesser distortion in H-level segments than in M-level segments following noise-suppression processing suggests that differential processing distortion might contribute to the H-level advantage observed.