Effects of Audio-visual and Contextual Conditions on Auditory Word Recognition in Patients with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Abstract

Objectives: In this study, we compared performance on the auditory word recognition tasks between patients with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) and healthy elderly adults (HE) under different visual, auditory, and contextual conditions to determine how these variables affect auditory comprehension with cognitive decline.Methods: We conducted a standardized comprehension assessment, Paradise Korean Western Aphasia Battery Revised (PK-WAB-R) and the auditory word recognition tasks on 30 patients with NPH and 30 HE. The auditory word recognition task was divided into noisy and quiet conditions (auditory variable), blurry and clean conditions (visual variable), and low- and high-context conditions (contextual variable).Results: Patients with NPH showed relatively good comprehension on the standardized comprehension test of PK-WAB-R. For the auditory word recognition tasks, there was a significant main effect of group, a significant within-group effect of auditory and contextual conditions, and significant interaction effects between auditory condition and group, auditory condition and contextual information, and auditory condition, contextual information, and group.Conclusion: This study confirmed that patients with NPH have difficulty processing auditory comprehension at the sentence level. In addition, the auditory word recognition performance in patients with NPH was significantly lower than HE, and that their difficulties may be more pronounced under certain conditions, such as noisy conditions and low contextual information.