gms | German Medical Science

The concept of listening effort is critical in understanding the challenges listeners face in verbal communication, which are not fully predicted by audiometric measures such as speech tests [1]. This holds especially true since speech understanding in challenging acoustic situations relies on both sensory and cognitive abilities. Due to the fact that cognitive capacity is generally limited [2] an increased demand level such as speech perception in noise results in fewer resources available for other tasks. From this rationale, we measured the listening effort objectively via a dual task paradigm consisting of a primary task (identifying sentences in noise), and a secondary task (reaction time in a visual paradigm). Listening effort was also measured subjectively via the Adaptive CAtegorical Listening Effort Scaling (ACALES) [3].

The purpose of this study is to determine how listening effort differs among cochlear implant (CI) users compared to normal-hearing (NH) listeners and to examine the effect of CI experience on listening effort. The impact of listener traits as processing speed, task switching ability and working memory capacity, were examined relative to listening effort.

Our Hypotheses are that listening effort is higher for CI than NH listeners due to the degraded electrical signal conveyed by the CI and that longer CI experience means higher listening adaptation and therefore lower listening effort.