Cochlear Implants and Listening Effort: the Interaction of Cognitive and Sensory Constraints

What this Trial Is About

This research explores how adults using cochlear implants (CIs) understand and follow speech in real-world communication settings. It aims to find out whether recognizing speech sounds leads to understanding longer conversations. The study includes six linked experiments to examine how CI users use language context, handle listening effort, control speech speed, and how these factors affect comprehension compared to normal-hearing adults. The goal is to identify what helps or hinders communication and to develop better assessment and rehabilitation methods for CI users. Participants include postlingually deaf adults with at least one year of cochlear implant experience and normal-hearing adults listening to speech simulations processed through vocoders. The study involves behavioral speech perception and comprehension tests combined with pupillometry, which measures pupil dilation as a sign of listening effort. Each of the six experiments focuses on different aspects, such as syntactic and semantic context, false hearing, sentence recall, discourse comprehension, self-paced listening, and clinical application of these assessments. Participants will undergo a comprehensive baseline assessment of their hearing and cognitive abilities, including speech recognition and memory tests. During the study, researchers will track performance on various speech and comprehension tasks and measure listening effort through pupillometry. Outcomes include word and sentence recognition accuracy, recall of narrative details, and comprehension improvements with self-paced speech. The total participation time varies by experiment, with some lasting up to nine hours and others up to three hours.

Cochlear Implants and Listening Effort: the Interaction of Cognitive and Sensory Constraints