Listening Effort With Cochlear Implant Simulations

Pals, Carina; Sarampalis, Anastasios; Başkent, Deniz

doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2012/12-0074)

Cited by 91 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(58 reference statements)

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“…For NH listeners, the significant effect of segregation cues on cognitive load was only observed in the stimulus interval even though the interaction between cue type and interval was not significant in Experiment I. Both observations suggest that the cognitive load measured in the stimulus interval was more sensitive to different listening conditions than that measured in the response interval, consistent with the findings by Pals et al (2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Spatial release of cognitive load measured in a dual-task paradigm in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Xia

Nooraei

Kalluri

et al. 2015

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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This study investigated whether spatial separation between talkers helps reduce cognitive processing load, and how hearing impairment interacts with the cognitive load of individuals listening in multi-talker environments. A dual-task paradigm was used in which performance on a secondary task (visual tracking) served as a measure of the cognitive load imposed by a speech recognition task. Visual tracking performance was measured under four conditions in which the target and the interferers were distinguished by (1) gender and spatial location, (2) gender only, (3) spatial location only, and (4) neither gender nor spatial location. Results showed that when gender cues were available, a 15° spatial separation between talkers reduced the cognitive load of listening even though it did not provide further improvement in speech recognition (Experiment I). Compared to normal-hearing listeners, large individual variability in spatial release of cognitive load was observed among hearing-impaired listeners. Cognitive load was lower when talkers were spatially separated by 60° than when talkers were of different genders, even though speech recognition was comparable in these two conditions (Experiment II). These results suggest that a measure of cognitive load might provide valuable insight into the benefit of spatial cues in multi-talker environments.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Spatial release of cognitive load measured in a dual-task paradigm in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Xia

Nooraei

Kalluri

et al. 2015

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…If one makes the listening task more difficult through, for example, the addition of background noise, then more cognitive capacity would be required to maintain an acceptable level of speech recognition (Moray 1967) and thereby decreasing the supply of resources that is available to perform the secondary task. One method of quantifying this said performance is by measuring the reaction or response time it takes to complete the secondary task (e.g., Hicks & Tharpe 2002;Sarampalis et al 2009;Houben et al 2013;Pals et al 2013;Picou & Ricketts 2014b). A lengthening of reaction/response time in the same participant is indicative of an increase of cognitive resource consumption by the primary listening task and by extension an increase in the level of listening effort.…”

Section: Listening Effortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Hsu

Vanpoucke²,

Wieringen

2017

Ear &Amp; Hearing

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Objectives: A reliable measure of listening effort is crucial for helping children with communication disorders. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioural paradigm designed to measure listening effort in school-age children and present the results of its validation in a group of normal-hearing children. The paradigm consists of a classic word recognition task in quiet and noise coupled to one of three categorization tasks requiring the children to judge either the color of two pictures or the meaning of the presented words. The response time from the categorization tasks is considered the primary indicator of listening effort. Design:The listening effort paradigm was evaluated in a group of 31 normal-hearing children 7 to 12 years of age without any history of language or developmental disorders. Custom software was developed to allow administration of the entire paradigm from a conventional laptop computer. A separate touch screen was used as a response interface to gather response time (RT) data from the children. All verbal responses were judged from an experienced tester in order to produce a word recognition score (WRS) for each condition. The software presented randomized lists of 146 selected Dutch nouns in one of three signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) to examine the potential effect of noise on both WRS and RT. Three distinct categorization tasks were also developed to examine how different depths of semantic processing would affect the two outcome measures of WRS and RT. It was hypothesized that, while listening effort as measured by RT would be affected by both noise level and the depth of semantic processing, WRS performance would be affected by changes in noise level only.Results: There was a significant effect of SNR level on school-age children's WRS: their word recognition performance tended to decrease with increasing background noise level. However, depth of processing did not appear to affect WRS. Moreover, a repeated-measure analysis of variance (rANOVA) fitted to transformed RT data revealed that this measure of listening effort in normal-hearing school-age children was significantly affected by both SNR level and the depth of semantic processing. There was no significant interaction between noise level and the type of categorization task with regard to RT. Conclusion:The patterns of WRS and RT as observed in our data sets provided support for our general hypothesis regarding the effects of background noise and semantic processing level on speech understanding and listening effort. Even though the magnitude of change in listening effort did not differ between the three novel categorization tasks, the exploratory nature of the current study warranted further evaluation of processing depths as a potential listening effort assessment paradigm in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired populations.

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“…The findings of the present study reinforce the need for new tools or evaluation metrics in capturing benefits or treatment effectiveness beyond the traditional measure of percentage correct for speech intelligibility. Recent studies have shown a reduction in listening effort (measured by the reaction time to the secondary task or by the change of pupil size) as the quality of the auditory signal improved beyond the asymptotic performance in a recognition task (e.g., Sarampalis et al, 2009;Pals et al, 2013;Winn et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-frequency fine-structure cues allow for the online use of lexical stress during spoken-word recognition in spectrally degraded speech

Kong

Jesse

2017

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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English listeners use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress during spoken-word recognition. Prosodic cues are, however, less salient in spectrally degraded speech, as provided by cochlear implants. The present study examined how spectral degradation with and without low-frequency fine-structure information affects normal-hearing listeners' ability to benefit from suprasegmental cues to lexical stress in online spoken-word recognition. To simulate electric hearing, an eight-channel vocoder spectrally degraded the stimuli while preserving temporal envelope information. Additional lowpass-filtered speech was presented to the opposite ear to simulate bimodal hearing. Using a visual world paradigm, listeners' eye fixations to four printed words (target, competitor, two distractors) were tracked, while hearing a word. The target and competitor overlapped segmentally in their first two syllables but mismatched suprasegmentally in their first syllables, as the initial syllable received primary stress in one word and secondary stress in the other (e.g., "'admiral," ""admi'ration"). In the vocoder-only condition, listeners were unable to use lexical stress to recognize targets before segmental information disambiguated them from competitors. With additional lowpass-filtered speech, however, listeners efficiently processed prosodic information to speed up online word recognition. Low-frequency fine-structure cues in simulated bimodal hearing allowed listeners to benefit from suprasegmental cues to lexical stress during word recognition.

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Listening Effort With Cochlear Implant Simulations

Abstract: The results suggest that listening effort decreases with increased spectral resolution. Moreover, these improvements are best reflected in objective measures of listening effort, such as RTs on a secondary task, rather than intelligibility scores or subjective effort measures.

Cited by 91 publications

References 43 publications

Spatial release of cognitive load measured in a dual-task paradigm in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Spatial release of cognitive load measured in a dual-task paradigm in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Low-frequency fine-structure cues allow for the online use of lexical stress during spoken-word recognition in spectrally degraded speech

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