Cochlear Implants and Listening Effort: the Interaction of Cognitive and Sensory Constraints
NYU Langone Health
Summary
This study examines how cochlear implant users understand and comprehend speech in realistic communication situations. Through six experiments measuring listening effort via pupillometry and discourse comprehension, we will investigate how linguistic context, cognitive demands, and processing time affect speech understanding in CI users, and in normal-hearing controls) to identify factors underlying communication resilience versus vulnerability and develop improved, ecologically valid assessment and rehabilitation strategies.
Description
This research study examines how adults using cochlear implants (CIs) understand and comprehend speech in realistic communication situations. While current clinical tests focus on how well CI users can recognize single words and simple sentences, this study investigates whether success in recognizing speech sounds actually translates to understanding the meaning and content of longer conversations and discourse. The study will include six interconnected experiments examining: (1) how CI users use linguistic context (both adaptively and maladaptively) to understand degraded speech; (2) how lis…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 18–80 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria: * Subjects will be otherwise healthy normal-hearing and cochlear implant (CI) adult listeners (between 18 and 80 years old). Exclusion Criteria: * Individuals below 18 years of age. * Individuals with evidence of neurologic, vascular or psychiatric disease or dementia, and taking medications that might interfere with task performance. * Individuals with a history of language disorders (besides those associated with hearing loss for the CI users). Individuals who are non-native speakers of American English.
Interventions
- BehavioralExperiment 1: Syntactic and Semantic Context
* Recall of meaningful sentences, anomalous word strings, and unstructured word lists * Measurement of syntactic and semantic gain * Pupillometry during auditory and visual presentation
- BehavioralExperiment 2: False Hearing and Context Overuse
* Two-choice word recognition task with semantic priming/luring in multi-talker babble * Three Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels (heavy, medium, light noise) * Confidence ratings for responses * Pupillometry measurement
- BehavioralExperiment 3: Two-Sentence Problem
* Speech recognition and recall of single sentences vs. paired sentences * Manipulation of inter-sentence semantic predictability (high vs. low) * Four test conditions: 1-sentence, 2-sentences, 2-sentences+pre-prompt, 2-sentences+post-prompt * Pupillometry during task
- BehavioralExperiment 4: Cascading Effects on Discourse Comprehension
* Recall of 27 narrative passages (67-97 words each) * Propositional analysis scoring (main ideas, mid-level ideas, details) * Measurement of semantic hierarchy effect * Pupillometry during listening
- Behavioral
Locations (2)
- Brandeis UniversityWaltham, Massachusetts
- NYU Langone HealthNew York, New York