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

Conditions

• Memory, Delayed
• Sensorineural Hearing Loss
• Speech

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

60 Years - 90 Years

Healthy Volunteers

Accepted

Interventions

• Sentence stimulus — BEHAVIORAL
  The sentences are designed such that a specific target word is either (a) Plausible (normal), (b) a semantic pragmatic violation, or (c) a morpho-syntactic violation. Example: e.g., "Every morning at breakfast, the boys would (A: EAT)/ (B.PLANT )/ (C. EATS ) eggs..."
• Speaking style — BEHAVIORAL
  The sentences will be presented either in A. conversational speaking style, or B. hyper-articulated clear speech style. Clear and conversational speech samples will be elicited from a single male talker. In the conversational speech condition, which will be recorded first, the talker will be instructed to read the sentences as they would in everyday conversation. In the clear speech condition, the talker will be instructed to produce the sentences as if they would if they were talking to a person with hearing loss.

Study Details

Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is among the most prevalent chronic conditions in aging and has a profoundly negative effect on speech comprehension, leading to increased social isolation, reduced quality of life, and increased risk for the development of dementia in older adulthood. Typical audiological tests and interventions, which focus on measuring and restoring audibility, do not explain the full range of cognitive difficulties that adults with hearing loss experience in speech comprehension. For example, adults with SNHL have to work disproportionally harder to decode acoustically degraded speech. That additional effort is thought to diminish shared executive and attentional resources for higher-level language processes, impacting subsequent comprehension and memory, even when speech is completely intelligible. This phenomenon has been referred to as listening effort (LE). There is a growing understanding that these cognitive factors are a critical and often "hidden effect" of hearing loss. At the same time, the effects of LE on the neural mechanisms of language processing and memory in SNHL are currently not well understood. In order to develop evidence-based assessments and interventions to improve comprehension and memory in SNHL, it is critical that the cognitive and neural mechanisms of LE and its consequences for speech comprehension are elucidated. In this project, the investigators adopt a multi-method approach, combining methods from clinical audiology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to address this gap of knowledge. Specifically, the investigators adopt a novel and innovative method of co-registering pupillometry (a reliable physiological measure of LE) and language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) measures during real-time speech processing to characterize the effects of clear speech (i.e., a listener-oriented speaking style that is spontaneously adopted to improve intelligibility when speakers are aware of a perception difficulty on behalf of the listener) on high-level language processes (e.g., semantic retrieval, syntactic integration) and subsequent speech memory in older adults with SNHL. This innovative work addresses a time-sensitive gap in the literature regarding the identification of objective and reliable markers of specific neurocognitive processes impacted by speech clarity and LE in age-related SNHL.

Key Dates

Start date

Sep 12, 2023

Status verified

Jan 2025

Primary completion

Mar 1, 2025

Completion

Mar 1, 2025

Study Design

Enrollment

80 participants (estimated)

Allocation

NA

Intervention model

SINGLE_GROUP

Primary purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Arms

• Experimental: Speech Study
  The study is a within-subjects 2 x 3 factorial design. All participants are exposed to all experimental conditions or "interventions"

Primary Outcome Measure

N400 amplitude [ Time Frame: During the speech listening portion of the experiment, up to 4 hours. ]

Central Contacts

• Brennan R Payne
  801-581-5040
  [email protected]

Locations (1)

Find similar trials in Salt Lake City, UT

Related Studies

• Neural Correlates of Real World Spatial Navigation in Humans
  Recruiting · Duke University · Los Angeles, California
• The Neural Coding of Speech Across Human Languages
  Enrolling By Invitation · University of California, San Francisco · San Francisco, California
• Quantification of Visually Evoked Cortical Potentials in Individuals With Hearing Loss
  Recruiting · Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center · Lebanon, New Hampshire
• Functional Organization of the Superior Temporal Gyrus for Speech Perception
  Enrolling By Invitation · University of California, San Francisco · San Francisco, California