nike air max 2009 Frontiers Of Hearing, Innovation

The latest news and discoveries from the science of sound will be featured at the 161st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) held May 23-27, 2011, at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel in Seattle, Wash. During the meeting,Lady Gaga Monster Headphones, the world's foremost experts in acoustics will present research spanning a diverse array of disciplines, including medicine, music, psychology, engineering, speech communication, noise control, and marine biology.
Highlights: Monday, May 23
Noisy Classrooms Most Challenging to Youngest Students
Noisy classrooms aren't just bad for harried teachers' nerves, they can significantly affect the ability of students to listen and learn. Researchers at the Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, have built a unique simulated classroom to help measure the scope of those effects and how they can be avoided. The model classroom - consisting of a desk at which test subjects are seated surrounded by an array of five LCD monitors and loudspeakers - was devised by architectural acoustician Daniel Valente and audiology researcher Dawna Lewis of the Boys Town Listening and Learning Lab. In a recent study, the researchers tested young and older elementary students as well as adults in the classroom. Although increasing levels of classroom noise and reverberation reduced the comprehension of all subjects, the youngest students - 8-year-olds - were the most adversely affected. "The combination of the difficult task as well as increased background noise and reverberation led to the younger children having a harder time following the story," Valente said. The results, he added, illustrate the importance of designing classrooms that reduce reverberation and ambient noise,nike air max 2009, and suggest that the standard practice of testing children in a sound booth with a single loudspeaker "may not be sufficient to identify problems students may be having in real classrooms with multiple talker locations, quick-changing talkers, and the interaction between background noise and the acoustical environment." The presentation 1pAAs9, "Effects of excessive noise and reverberation on listening and learning in a simulated classroom," is in the afternoon session on Monday, May 23.
Attention to Speech in Deaf Infants with Cochlear Implants
Cochlear implants can allow profoundly deaf infants to hear speech - giving them the chance to eventually learn spoken language. However, a new study shows that the children receiving the implants don't automatically know how to listen when people speak to them. In the study, cognitive psychologist Derek M. Houston of Indiana University measured attention to speech by infants with cochlear implants and normal-hearing babies by tracking how much time the babies looked at a checkerboard pattern on a TV monitor. "It has been well-established that infants will look longer at a simple display - the checkerboard pattern - when hearing something they are interested in," he explains, "so I measured their looking time at the pattern when it was paired with a repeating speech sound, and compared that to the looking time at the same pattern with no sound." Although there was large variation in the attentiveness of individual deaf babies to the sound, in general, these babies "did not attend to speech as much as their normal-hearing counterparts," says Houston. Furthermore, two years after implantation, children who were less attentive to speech early-on performed more poorly on a word recognition task. This insight should help guide speech-language pathologists working with children who have cochlear implants. The presentation 1pPP5, "Deaf infants' attention to speech after cochlear implantation," will be Monday afternoon, May 23, in Grand Ballroom C.