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The Distortional Aspect of Sensorineural Hearing Loss: What Can Be Done

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1.  The A & D components of SNHL stand for:
  1. Amplification and De-sensitivity
  2. Attenuation and Distortion
  3. Asymmetry and Dis-synchrony
  4. Audiometry and Diagnostics
2.  Loudness growth in ears with SNHL:
  1. Is smooth from threshold to UCL
  2. Is totally unrelated to threshold
  3. May not be similar in two ears with the same thresholds and UCLs
  4. Is always consistent between ears
3.  Frequency resolution in ears with SNHL:
  1. Is highly predictable based on thresholds
  2. Shows little variation across a population with similar thresholds
  3. Cannot actually be measured
  4. Can show variability across frequency and between ears of a given patient
4.  Inhibition:
  1. When lost, reduces the ability of the ear to sharply encode frequency
  2. Is only a visual phenomenon
  3. Occurs more often in the presence of SNHL
  4. Is a loudness-related concept
5.  Proper speech encoding in the peripheral auditory system requires:
  1. Loss of inhibition
  2. Complete upward spread of masking
  3. The accurate representation of rapidly changing energy burst of various bandwidths
  4. Precise loudness balancing
6.  Increasing the bandwidth in hearing devices:
  1. Allows access to more phonemic information
  2. Increases the opportunity to hear target speech sounds compared to competing speech sounds
  3. Better localization of the speech signal in space
  4. All of the above
7.  The S/N can be improved in hearing devices by:
  1. The use of noise reduction
  2. The use of loudness balancing
  3. The use of directionality
  4. All of the above
8.  Upward Spread of Masking is:
  1. Typically minimized by prescriptive gain targets
  2. Enhanced via open fittings
  3. Absent in the ear with normal hearing
  4. Ensured if noise reduction is employed
9.  Multi-channel compression:
  1. Addresses the reduced dynamic range in ears with SNHL
  2. Can reduce the ability to extract speech information from a complex signal
  3. Can help to minimize the effects of upward spread of masking
  4. All of the above
10.  The psychoacoustic changes typical in SNHL can:
  1. Can be partially offset with modern hearing aid technology
  2. Can be minimized only via the use of directionality
  3. No longer affect speech understanding in complex environments because of advanced digital signal processing
  4. Have been found to have no significant impact on speech understanding