2016 — 2018 |
Winn, Matthew Brandon |
R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Measuring Listening Effort and Spectral Resolution in Cochlear Implant Patients @ University of Washington
? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): People with hearing impairment are known to exert more effort to understand speech, which leads to increased listening fatigue, need for recovery after work, incidence of stress-related sick leave, greater prevalence of unemployment, and social isolation. Listening effort is an issue of great importance to patients' quality of life and satisfaction with treatment. However, the gold standard of audiological outcome measures is speech intelligibility scores, which do not convey information about the effort exerted during speech perception, nor the perceptual mechanisms by which speech sounds are identified. Cochlear implants (CIs) are an increasingly common form of treatment for people with severe to profound hearing loss. Despite the increased prevalence and increased success of CIs in the past decade, there is little known about listening effort and auditory factors that elevate or reduce effort in this clinical population. One factor that is likely to be relevant is auditory spetral resolution, or signal clarity in the frequency domain, which is known to be especially poor in CIs. Poor spectral resolution also alters the way that listeners weight acoustic cues when identifying speech sounds. A chief goal in CI technology is to improve spectral resolution, which should facilitate not just better speech intelligibility, but also reduced effort. Spectral resolution inCIs can be improved by reducing the spread of excitation (SOE) in the cochlea. The partial tripolar (PTP) stimulation mode reduces SOE by using opposite-polarity flanking electrodes to focus current generated by each active electrode in a CI. PTP has been shown to yield modest improvements in speech intelligibility, pitch perception, and distinction of spectral cues in non-speech sounds for some patients. As speech intelligibility measures can remain stable in spite of changes in effort and resolution, it is not known whether reduction in SOE can lower listening effort or facilitate spectral cue perception in speech sounds. In the current project, PTP stimulation will be used to reduce SOE in CIs, which is hypothesized to lower listening effort and increase perception of spectral cues in speech. Effort will be measured using pupillometry, which is a sensitive measure of cognitive load that has been used across many domains, including speech perception. Speech cue perception will be assessed with auditory cue-weighting tasks that have previously shown to be sensitive to changes in spectral resolution. Cue-weighting patterns that are changed to resemble those used by listeners with normal hearing are expected to be associated with reductions in listening effort. The planned measures represent an effort to address the critical problem of spectral resolution in CIs, which are a common treatment for hearing impairment. Using innovative physiological and behavioral measurement techniques, it is expected that the benefits of using PTP as a means of improving spectral resolution for CI users will be borne out in measures of listening effort and phonetic cue weighting.
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2018 — 2021 |
Winn, Matthew Brandon |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Listening Effort in Cochlear Implant Users @ University of Minnesota
Project summary / abstract Listening to speech is more effortful for people with hearing loss than for those with normal hearing. Individuals with hearing loss report greater amounts of fatigue, anxiety, and more sick-leave from work, and social isolation. All of these factors impact quality of life for individuals, their friends and families. This project is designed to better understand what makes speech perception more effortful than what would predicted by common audiological measures like pure-tone thresholds and speech intelligibility scores. Specifically, we will explore the mental cost of relying on context to figure out words, and whether that process gets disrupted by the need to continue listening to upcoming sentences. We will also explore whether slower speaking rate allows listeners to recover from mistakes in a timely fashion without missing the next sentence. These studies will start with people who use cochlear implants, which are neural prosthetic devices that give auditory sensation to people who have severe to profound hearing loss. We will quantify listening effort using time- series measures of pupil dilation. These studies are intended to help understand listening effort and the experience of hearing loss in ways that have not yet been revealed. After identifying particularly problematic listening situations, we will expand the scope of work to include people with mild to moderate hearing loss in similar experimental conditions.
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