The timing of deploying and withholding listening effort, in listeners with normal hearing or with cochlear implants

2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (4) ◽  
pp. A340-A340
Author(s):  
Matthew B. Winn ◽  
Katherine Teece
2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (08) ◽  
pp. 685-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann E. Perreau ◽  
Yu-Hsiang Wu ◽  
Bailey Tatge ◽  
Diana Irwin ◽  
Daniel Corts

AbstractStudies have examined listening effort in individuals with hearing loss to determine the extent of the impairment. Regarding cochlear implants (CIs), results suggest that listening effort is improved using bilateral CIs compared to unilateral CIs. Few studies have investigated listening effort and outcomes related to the hybrid CI.Here, we compared listening effort across three CI groups, and to a normal-hearing control group. The impact of listener traits, that is, age, age at onset of hearing loss, duration of CI use, and working memory capacity, were examined relative to listening effort.The participants completed a dual-task paradigm with a primary task identifying sentences in noise and a secondary task measuring reaction time on a Stroop test. Performance was assessed for all participant groups at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), ranging in 2-dB steps from 0 to +10 dB relative to an individual’s SNR-50, at which the speech recognition performance is 50% correct. Participants completed three questions on listening effort, the Spatial Hearing Questionnaire, and a reading span test.All 46 participants were adults. The four participant groups included (1) 12 individuals with normal hearing, (2) 10 with unilateral CIs, (3) 12 with bilateral CIs, and (4) 12 with a hybrid short-electrode CI and bilateral residual hearing.Results from the dual-task experiment were compared using a mixed 4 (hearing group) by 6 (SNR condition) analysis of variance (ANOVA). Questionnaire results were compared using one-way ANOVAs, and correlations between listener traits and the objective and subjective measures were compared using Pearson correlation coefficients.Significant differences were found in speech perception among the normal-hearing and the unilateral and the bilateral CI groups. There was no difference in primary task performance among the hybrid CI and the normal-hearing groups. Across the six SNR conditions, listening effort improved to a greater degree for the normal-hearing group compared to the CI groups. However, there was no significant difference in listening effort between the CI groups. The subjective measures revealed significant differences between the normal-hearing and CI groups, but no difference among the three CI groups. Across all groups, age was significantly correlated with listening effort. We found no relationship between listening effort and the age at the onset of hearing loss, age at implantation, the duration of CI use, and working memory capacity for these participants.Listening effort was reduced to a greater degree for the normal-hearing group compared to the CI users. There was no significant difference in listening effort among the CI groups. For the CI users in this study, age was a significant factor with regard to listening effort, whereas other variables such as the duration of CI use and the age at the onset of hearing loss were not significantly related to listening effort.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Winn ◽  
Katherine H. Teece

Speech perception and listening effort are complicated and interrelated concepts. One might assume that intelligibility performance (percent correct) is a proxy for listening effort, but there are some reasons to challenge whether that is actually true. Correct responses in speech perception tests could reflect effortful mental processing, and a completely wrong answer could evoke very little effort, especially if the misperception itself is linguistically well-formed and sensible. This paper presents evidence that listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct, but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. We offer a taxonomy of error types that is both intuitive and also consistent with data from two experiments measuring listening effort with careful controls to either elicit specific kinds of mistakes or to track specific mistakes retrospectively. Participants included individuals with normal hearing or with cochlear implants. In two experiments of sentence repetition, listening effort – indexed by changes in pupil size – was found to scale with the amount of perceptual restoration needed (phoneme versus whole word), and also scale with the sensibility of responses, but not with the number of intelligibility errors. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them in order to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.


2020 ◽  
Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽  
Author(s):  
Benson Cheng-Lin Hsu ◽  
Filiep Vanpoucke ◽  
Margreet Langereis ◽  
Ann Dierckx ◽  
Astrid van Wieringen

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 986-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa R. Park ◽  
Erika B. Gagnon ◽  
Erin Thompson ◽  
Kevin D. Brown

Purpose The aims of this study were to (a) determine a metric for describing full-time use (FTU), (b) establish whether age at FTU in children with cochlear implants (CIs) predicts language at 3 years of age better than age at surgery, and (c) describe the extent of FTU and length of time it took to establish FTU in this population. Method This retrospective analysis examined receptive and expressive language outcomes at 3 years of age for 40 children with CIs. Multiple linear regression analyses were run with age at surgery and age at FTU as predictor variables. FTU definitions included 8 hr of device use and 80% of average waking hours for a typically developing child. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the establishment and degree of FTU. Results Although 8 hr of daily wear is typically considered FTU in the literature, the 80% hearing hours percentage metric accounts for more variability in outcomes. For both receptive and expressive language, age at FTU was found to be a better predictor of outcomes than age at surgery. It took an average of 17 months for children in this cohort to establish FTU, and only 52.5% reached this milestone by the time they were 3 years old. Conclusions Children with normal hearing can access spoken language whenever they are awake, and the amount of time young children are awake increases with age. A metric that incorporates the percentage of time that children with CIs have access to sound as compared to their same-aged peers with normal hearing accounts for more variability in outcomes than using an arbitrary number of hours. Although early FTU is not possible without surgery occurring at a young age, device placement does not guarantee use and does not predict language outcomes as well as age at FTU.


Author(s):  
Paris Binos

Vocants are precursors to speech and are facially neutral. The presence of these speechlike vocalizations was evident during the precursors to mature phonology called “protophones”. The prosodic feature of duration of the nuclei plays a crucial role in the shift of prelexical to mature speech, since speech intelligibility is closely related to the control of duration. The aim of this work is to determine whether cochlear implants (CIs) positively trigger language acquisition and the development of verbal skills. Recent literature findings are compared and discussed with the performance of two Greek congenitally hearing-impaired infants who were matched with three normal-hearing (NH) infants. This work highlighted an important weakness of the prosodic abilities of young infants with CIs.


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