An official website of the United States government
Purpose: The goal of this study was to assess the listening behavior and social engagement of cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) adults in daily life and relate these actions to objective hearing outcomes. Method: Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) collected using a smartphone app were used to probe patterns of listening behavior in CI users and age-matched NH adults to detect differences in social engagement and listening behavior in daily life. Participants completed very short surveys every 2 hr to provide snapshots of typical, everyday listening and socializing, as well as longer, reflective surveys at the end of the day to assess listening strategies and coping behavior. Speech perception testing, with accompanying ratings of task difficulty, was also performed in a lab setting to uncover possible correlations between objective and subjective listening behavior. Results: Comparisons between speech intelligibility testing and EMA responses showed poorer performing CI users spending more time at home and less time conversing with others than higher performing CI users and their NH peers. Perception of listening difficulty was also very different for CI users and NH listeners, with CI users reporting little difficulty despite poor speech perception performance. However, both CI users and NH listeners spent most of their time in listening environments they considered “not difficult.” CI users also reported using several compensatory listening strategies, such as visual cues, whereas NH listeners did not. Conclusion: Overall, the data indicate systematic differences between how individual CI users and NH adults navigate and manipulate listening and social environments in everyday life.
more »
« less
Auditory environment diversity quantified using entropy from real-world hearing aid data
Introduction Using data collected from hearing aid users’ own hearing aids could improve the customization of hearing aid processing for different users based on the auditory environments they encounter in daily life. Prior studies characterizing hearing aid users’ auditory environments have focused on mean sound pressure levels and proportions of environments based on classifications. In this study, we extend these approaches by introducing entropy to quantify the diversity of auditory environments hearing aid users encounter. Materials and Methods Participants from 4 groups (younger listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing loss from an urban or rural area) wore research hearing aids and completed ecological momentary assessments on a smartphone for 1 week. The smartphone was programmed to sample the processing state (input sound pressure level and environment classification) of the hearing aids every 10 min and deliver an ecological momentary assessment every 40 min. Entropy values for sound pressure levels, environment classifications, and ecological momentary assessment responses were calculated for each participant to quantify the diversity of auditory environments encountered over the course of the week. Entropy values between groups were compared. Group differences in entropy were compared to prior work reporting differences in mean sound pressure levels and proportions of environment classifications. Group differences in entropy measured objectively from the hearing aid data were also compared to differences in entropy measured from the self-report ecological momentary assessment data. Results Auditory environment diversity, quantified using entropy from the hearing aid data, was significantly higher for younger listeners than older listeners. Entropy measured using ecological momentary assessment was also significantly higher for younger listeners than older listeners. Discussion Using entropy, we show that younger listeners experience a greater diversity of auditory environments than older listeners. Alignment of group entropy differences with differences in sound pressure levels and hearing aid feature activation previously reported, along with alignment with ecological momentary response entropy, suggests that entropy is a valid and useful metric. We conclude that entropy is a simple and intuitive way to measure auditory environment diversity using hearing aid data.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1838830
- PAR ID:
- 10411793
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Digital Health
- Volume:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2673-253X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Normal-hearing older listeners are as accurate as younger listeners when perceiving native English words in quiet despite challenges in temporal processing. Older listeners may compensate for the declined use of fine-grained temporal cues by reducing the weight of temporal cues (VOT) and increase the reliance on other acoustic correlates (F0) of the sound contrast. In Experiment 1, younger (age 18–25) and older (age 55–65) normal-hearing listeners participate in an online 2AFC identification task with /d/-/t/ contrast varying in both VOT and F0. We predict that, while both younger and older listeners rely more on VOT than on F0, older listeners, because of their reduced temporal processing abilities, rely on F0 to a larger degree than younger listeners. Temporal processing not only involves local durational cues of the target segments, but also global contextual cues such as speaking rate. In Experiment 2, the same listeners complete another online 2AFC identification task with /dɑ/-/tɑ/ syllables that vary in VOT and vowel duration (short versus long). We predict that older listeners exhibit a smaller shift in the /d/-/t/ category boundary between the long and short vowel durations than younger listeners since older adults are less sensitive to contextual temporal information.more » « less
-
Speech recognition in noisy environments can be challenging and requires listeners to accurately segregate a target speaker from irrelevant background noise. Stochastic figure-ground (SFG) tasks in which temporally coherent inharmonic pure-tones must be identified from a background have been used to probe the non-linguistic auditory stream segregation processes important for speech-in-noise processing. However, little is known about the relationship between performance on SFG tasks and speech-in-noise tasks nor the individual differences that may modulate such relationships. In this study, 37 younger normal-hearing adults performed an SFG task with target figure chords consisting of four, six, eight, or ten temporally coherent tones amongst a background of randomly varying tones. Stimuli were designed to be spectrally and temporally flat. An increased number of temporally coherent tones resulted in higher accuracy and faster reaction times (RTs). For ten target tones, faster RTs were associated with better scores on the Quick Speech-in-Noise task. Individual differences in working memory capacity and self-reported musicianship further modulated these relationships. Overall, results demonstrate that the SFG task could serve as an assessment of auditory stream segregation accuracy and RT that is sensitive to individual differences in cognitive and auditory abilities, even among younger normal-hearing adults.more » « less
-
This dissertation compared speech perception across younger and older normal-hearing adults. We ask four research questions to assess acoustic cue weighting and the role of contextual information (lexical information and speaking rate) in speech perception. Experiment 1 tested for age-related changes in cue-weighting. The absolute weights showed that older listeners relied on both VOT and F0 more than younger listeners, and some listeners’ reliance on VOT correlated with inhibitory control when perceiving the /d/-/t/ contrast. The relative weights suggested that older listeners relied on VOT less and F0 more than younger listeners. Experiment 2 tested whether younger and older listeners used different cue-weighting adjustment strategies in distributional learning. Both older and younger listeners adjusted their reliance on acoustic cues when the primary acoustic cue (VOT) became ambiguous. Older listeners adjusted F0 to a greater degree than younger listeners, while younger listeners adjusted VOT more than older listeners. With a lexically-guided learning paradigm, Experiment 3 explored if younger and older adults differed in their use of lexical information when learning to map acoustic tokens that were ambiguous. Older and younger listeners utilized the lexical context to the same extent. In Experiment 4, the contextual effect of speaking rate was examined by embedding voicing contrasts in short and long syllables and presenting these syllables to younger and older listeners. Older and younger listeners compensated for variation in speaking rate in a similar manner as younger listeners. The findings in perceptual learning demonstrate perceptual flexibility among normal-hearing older listeners, despite an assumed decline in temporal processing.more » « less
-
Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presented listeners with simultaneous speech from one, two, three, or five simultaneous talkers, corresponding to a range of signal-to-noise ratios (clean, 0, −3, and −6 dB), and derived the ABR to each talker in the mixture. Each talker in a mixture was treated in turn as a target sound masked by other talkers, making the response quicker to acquire. We found consistently across listeners that ABR Wave V amplitudes decreased and latencies increased as the number of competing talkers increased.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2023.1141917
