What this Trial Is About

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is a common chronic condition in older adults that negatively impacts speech understanding, leading to social isolation, reduced quality of life, and increased dementia risk. While typical hearing tests focus on audibility, they do not fully explain the cognitive challenges people with SNHL face during speech comprehension. This study explores how listening effort affects the brain's language processing and memory by using advanced methods combining audiology, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The study involves 80 older adults aged 60 to 90, grouped by hearing ability from normal to clinically relevant hearing loss. Participants will listen to sentences spoken in either a conversational style or a clear speech style designed for listeners with hearing difficulties. During this, brain activity and pupil dilation will be recorded to understand how speech clarity influences language processing and memory. The experiment consists of 360 trials with sentences containing normal, semantic, or syntactic variations presented with background noise to challenge hearing. Participants will attend a single 3-4 hour session including hearing and cognitive tests, followed by the main experiment with EEG and pupillometry measurements. Afterward, they will complete a memory task identifying sentences they heard and recalling target words. Researchers will measure brain responses, pupil size changes, and memory performance to study the effects of listening effort and speech clarity in SNHL. Safety and privacy are maintained throughout the study.

Effects of Clear Speech on Listening Effort and Memory in Sentence Processing