Journal of Phonetics & Audiology
Open Access

Presence of Tinnitus in Normally Hearing Patients

Dirk Rood^{* *}Correspondence: Dirk Rood, Department of Acoustics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, Email:

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Description

Tinnitus is the perception of hearing a sound without external source. Noise disrupts communication between people in many situations, resulting in poor speech understanding. Tinnitus frequently co-exists with hearing loss, in which case a level of poor speech understanding could be attributed to the brain's need to deal with less sensory information [1].

Normal-hearing people with tinnitus, on the other hand, frequently complain of difficulty in understanding speech, particularly when there is background noise, and they often blame their tinnitus for this. Speech-in-noise perception is one of the most difficult challenges that listeners confront on a daily basis, including the combination of peripheral hearing and cognitive processes [2]. This task may be difficult for tinnitus sufferers because the tinnitus may operate as a distractor, competing with the target speech. In the presence of background noise, several researchers have established that normally hearing tinnitus individuals have lower speech perception skill than controls. Researchers compared Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) and spectral and temporal resolution in tinnitus patients with a control group. Tinnitus patients had considerably lower SRT ratings, even though there were no differences in spectral or temporal abilities between the groups [3]. Furthermore, a recent study indicated that noise-exposed adolescents with tinnitus had lower speech-in-noise understanding than equivalent adolescents without tinnitus. Overall, the findings imply that those with tinnitus have a harder time processing speech than those who do not.

Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) is a term used to describe difficulties in the central nervous system's perceptual processing of auditory information; it is thought to be caused by issues with the same underlying neurobiological activity that causes electrophysiological auditory potentials. CAPD is a term that refers to a group of disorders that impact auditory analysis. Patients with CAPD often have normal auditory threshold sensitivity but have trouble detecting speech in noisy environments. CAPD is defined as impairment in the Central Nervous System's (CNS) ability to use auditory information effectively, including inter-hemispheric communication. There is no globally approved test battery to diagnose CAPD disorder at this time. However, it has been suggested that standardized verbal and nonverbal tests used in CAPD assessments could be utilized to measure central auditory processing [4]. When at least two CAP tests are abnormal, CAPD is present, according to the researchers. When peripheral hearing is intact but one or more central auditory processes are impaired, CAPD is diagnosed. Sound source localization; level discrimination; temporal patterning; temporal aspects (such as temporal integration, temporal discrimination, gap detection, temporal ordering/ sequencing of rapid events, and temporal masking); and the ability to recognize words in the presence of competing acoustic signals (such as dichotic listening) or to interpret speech that has been degraded. Auditory temporal processing capacity is defined as the ability to perceive a sound within a specific time interval. Tinnitus appears to cause auditory processing to be disrupted at several levels of the auditory pathway, which could have a negative impact on auditory function.

We expected that tinnitus patient’s auditory processing would be disrupted, which would affect speech perception. The goal of this study was to evaluate the auditory processing capacities of two groups of people: those with normal hearing and tinnitus, and those without tinnitus.

Conclusion

Tinnitus may be accompanied with auditory processing difficulties in normally hearing patients. There are a variety of other psychoacoustic tests that might be evaluated as viable diagnostic tools in individuals with tinnitus to more comprehensively assess such difficulties.

References

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