Results of an auditory training for blind/visually impaired children and teenagers are presented. A measure of the training eectiveness is the dierence between the results of a pre-and post-training verication test. Two age groups of visually handicapped young persons were tested: 712 years old and 1419 years old. It was shown that the training may be beneciary for blind or visually impaired children and teenagers, especially in tasks related to localization of moving sound sources. No dierences in training results were found between age groups. The results of trained groups were compared to those obtained for not trained control groups of young blind individuals.
Performance of blind/visually impaired children and teenagers before and after the auditory training and the music training in some auditory tasks (pitch discrimination, pitch-timbre categorization, pitch memory, lateralization of a stationary sound of a drum, lateralization of one or two moving motor vehicles) is compared. In the auditory training, the subjects were actively involved, i.e. they had to answer questions related to presented sound material. The music training was based on passive listening to sounds presented according to the Tomatis method. The training (auditory or music) effectiveness was measured as a difference between results of a pre-and post-training verification test in which the subjects were asked to perform the auditory tasks mentioned at the beginning. The persons who took part in the study were divided into two age groups: 7-12 year olds and 13-19 year olds. According to the results, the auditory training was beneficial for blind or visually impaired teenagers, especially in respect of lateralization tasks. For small children the auditory training was not as effective as for adolescents. However, it has been shown that the music training was generally beneficial for them, although none of the verification tasks was privileged.
The impact of musical experience on results concerning sound perception in selected auditory tasks, such as pitch discrimination, pitch-timbre categorization and pitch memorization for blind and visually impaired children and teenagers is discussed. Subjects were divided into three groups: of those with no experience of music, with small musical experience and with substantial musical experience. The blind and visually impaired subjects were investigated, while sighted persons formed reference groups. To date no study has described impact of musical experience on results of such experiments for blind and visually impaired children and teenagers. Our results suggest that blind persons with musical experience may be more sensitive to frequency differences and differences in timbre between two signals as well as may have better short-term auditory memory than blind people with no musical experience. Musical experience of visually impaired persons does not necessary lead to better performance in all conducted auditory tasks.
The aim of this study was to create a single-language counterpart of the International Speech Test Signal (ISTS) and to compare both with respect to their acoustical characteristics. The development procedure of the Polish Speech Test Signal (PSTS) was analogous to the one of ISTS. The main difference was that instead of multi-lingual recordings, speech recordings of five Polish speakers were used. The recordings were cut into 100-600 ms long segments and composed into one-minute long signal, obeying a set of composition rules, imposed mainly to preserve a natural, speech-like features of the signal. Analyses revealed some differences between ISTS and PSTS. The latter has about twice as high volume of voiceless fragments of speech. PSTS's sound pressure levels in 1/3-octave bands resemble the shape of the Polish long-term average female speech spectrum, having distinctive maxima at 3-4 and 8-10 kHz which ISTS lacks. As PSTS is representative of Polish language and contains inputs from multiple speakers, it can potentially find an application as a standardized signal used during the procedure of fitting hearing aids for patients that use Polish as their main language.
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