On the Feasibility of Using Behavioral Listening Effort Test Methods to Evaluate Auditory Performance in Cochlear...

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Neuroscience
• Rehabilitation Engineering

Background:

• Assessing hearing aid and cochlear implant (CI) fitting requires realistic outcome measures for everyday hearing challenges.
• Listening effort measures may offer greater sensitivity than speech intelligibility measures for detecting differences in hearing-device settings when intelligibility is near maximal.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the feasibility of two tests for measuring changes in listening effort in CI users due to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) differences.
• To evaluate the suitability of these tests for clinical use by comparing the effect size of SNR differences on listening effort measures with test-retest differences.

Main Methods:

• Nineteen CI users participated in two listening effort tests (sentence-final word identification and recall test [SWIRT] and sentence verification test [SVT]) at two SNRs (+4 and +8 dB).
• Dual-task paradigms were employed to assess listening effort under varying acoustic conditions.

Main Results:

• Both SWIRT and SVT demonstrated a significant difference in listening effort between the tested SNRs.
• However, the effect size of these differences was comparable to test-retest variability.
• The sensitivity of these measures was not superior to traditional speech intelligibility measures.

Conclusions:

• The implemented SWIRT and SVT are not suitable for clinical measurement of listening effort differences in individual CI users.
• These tests can be effectively utilized in research settings for analyzing group data from CI users.