In many cases, tinnitus co-exists with hearing loss, in which case a level of poorer speech understanding might be considered to be the result of the brain having to deal with diminished sensory input. In many situations, communication between people is disturbed by noise, which makes for poorer speech understanding. Tinnitus is the perception of a sound without any external source. In normally hearing patients, the presence of tinnitus may be accompanied with auditory processing difficulties. Right-ear advantage (REA) was found for the controls, but not for the tinnitus subjects. The results for both groups were similar in the temporal ordering tests (FPT and DPT). The tinnitus subjects had significantly lower scores than the controls in the gap detection test ( pā<ā0.01) and in the dichotic listening test ( pā<ā0.001), but only for the right ear. To evaluate possible auditory processing deficits, the Frequency Pattern Test (FPT), Duration Pattern Test (DPT), Dichotic Listening Test (DLT), and Gap Detection Threshold (GDT) tests were performed. The audiological assessment comprised pure-tone audiometry and high-frequency pure-tone audiometry, impedance audiometry, and distortion product oto-acoustic emission assessment. The study group comprised 97 adults, 54 of whom had normal hearing and chronic tinnitus (the study group) and 43 who had normal hearing and no tinnitus (the control group). The purpose of the study was to evaluate the auditory processing abilities of normally hearing subjects with and without tinnitus. However, it also happens that patients with tinnitus who have normal hearing also report problems with speech understanding, and it is possible to suppose that tinnitus is to blame for difficulties in perceptual processing of auditory information. In most cases, tinnitus co-exists with hearing loss, suggesting that poorer speech understanding is simply due to a lack of acoustic information reaching the central nervous system (CNS).
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