Pienkowski M, Kunov H
Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2001 Apr;109(4):1496-502. doi: 10.1121/1.1354202.
A distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) suppression tuning curve (STC) shows the minimum level of suppressor tone that is required to reduce DPOAE level by a fixed amount, as a function of suppressor frequency. Several years ago, Mills [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 103, 507-523 (1998)] derived, theoretically, an approximately linear relationship between the tip-to-tail suppressor level difference on a DPOAE STC, and the gain of the cochlear amplifier, defined as the maximum increase in the active over the passive basilar membrane (BM) response. In this paper, preliminary data from adult human subjects are presented that establish a correlation between this tip-to-tail DPOAE STC difference and the threshold of hearing, the latter measured at the frequency of the f2 primary tone. Assuming that both suppression and the DPOAE are by-products of active, nonlinear BM dynamics, the above result suggests that threshold elevation in mild levels of hearing loss may be attributed, in part, to a reduction of cochlear amplifier gain, which is detectable with the suppression paradigm.
畸变产物耳声发射（DPOAE）抑制调谐曲线（STC）表示为了将DPOAE水平降低固定量所需的抑制音的最低水平，它是抑制音频率的函数。几年前，米尔斯[《美国声学学会杂志》103, 507 - 523 (1998)]从理论上推导了DPOAE STC上首尾抑制音水平差与耳蜗放大器增益之间的近似线性关系，耳蜗放大器增益定义为主动基底膜（BM）响应相对于被动BM响应的最大增加量。本文给出了来自成年人类受试者的初步数据，这些数据建立了这种首尾DPOAE STC差异与听力阈值之间的相关性，听力阈值是在f2主音频率处测量的。假设抑制和DPOAE都是主动的、非线性BM动力学的副产物，上述结果表明，轻度听力损失中的阈值升高可能部分归因于耳蜗放大器增益的降低，这可以通过抑制范式检测到。
