NCT05815537

Development of Functional Spatial Hearing in Reverberation

• Status: Completed
• Phase: EARLY_Phase 1
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 116 (actual)
• Sponsor: Father Flanagan's Boys' Home · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 6 Years – 30 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The goal of the clinical trial study (Phase 0) is to map out the developmental trajectory of functional spatial hearing abilities in reverberant environments for children with normal hearing between the ages of 6 and 18 years, and to understand the inter-relationships between the three perceptual abilities: auditory object size formation, spatial acuity, and spatial unmasking during typical development. Children are asked to perform psychoacoustic tasks when the auditory stimuli are processed to present in virtual acoustic environments (1) with no reverberation and (2) with one of the two levels of reverberation that emulate everyday indoor environments. The intervention of this clinical study is in the random assignment of one of the two reverberant environments. Researchers will compare these children with a group of normal-hearing adults to anchor matured performances.

Conditions

• Spatial Hearing Development

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Low-Reverberation	The exposure to low-reverberation is by presenting auditory stimuli to participants that are digitally processed to contain auditory cues that sound more or less reverberant, e.g., small classroom.
OTHER	High-Reverberation	The exposure to high-reverberation is by presenting auditory stimuli to participants that are digitally processed to contain auditory cues that sound more or less reverberant, e.g., large lecture hall/auditorium.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-01-01
• Primary completion: 2025-03-28
• Completion: 2025-06-30
• First posted: 2023-04-18
• Last updated: 2025-10-27

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States