RecruitingNot ApplicableNCT07279441

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

Sponsor

NYU Langone Health

Enrollment

460 participants

Start Date

Jan 2, 2025

Study Type

INTERVENTIONAL

Conditions

Cochlear Implant Users

Summary

This study examines how cochlear implant users understand and comprehend speech in realistic communication situations. Through six experiments measuring listening effort via pupillometry and discourse comprehension, we will investigate how linguistic context, cognitive demands, and processing time affect speech understanding in CI users, and in normal-hearing controls) to identify factors underlying communication resilience versus vulnerability and develop improved, ecologically valid assessment and rehabilitation strategies.

Eligibility

Min Age: 18 YearsMax Age: 80 Years

Inclusion Criteria1

Subjects will be otherwise healthy normal-hearing and cochlear implant (CI) adult listeners (between 18 and 80 years old).

Exclusion Criteria3

Individuals below 18 years of age.
Individuals with evidence of neurologic, vascular or psychiatric disease or dementia, and taking medications that might interfere with task performance.
Individuals with a history of language disorders (besides those associated with hearing loss for the CI users). Individuals who are non-native speakers of American English.

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Interventions

BEHAVIORALExperiment 1: Syntactic and Semantic Context

* Recall of meaningful sentences, anomalous word strings, and unstructured word lists * Measurement of syntactic and semantic gain * Pupillometry during auditory and visual presentation

BEHAVIORALExperiment 2: False Hearing and Context Overuse

* Two-choice word recognition task with semantic priming/luring in multi-talker babble * Three Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels (heavy, medium, light noise) * Confidence ratings for responses * Pupillometry measurement

BEHAVIORALExperiment 3: Two-Sentence Problem

* Speech recognition and recall of single sentences vs. paired sentences * Manipulation of inter-sentence semantic predictability (high vs. low) * Four test conditions: 1-sentence, 2-sentences, 2-sentences+pre-prompt, 2-sentences+post-prompt * Pupillometry during task

BEHAVIORALExperiment 4: Cascading Effects on Discourse Comprehension

* Recall of 27 narrative passages (67-97 words each) * Propositional analysis scoring (main ideas, mid-level ideas, details) * Measurement of semantic hierarchy effect * Pupillometry during listening

BEHAVIORALExperiment 5: Self-Paced Discourse Comprehension

* 24 discourse passages (150 words each): 12 narrative, 12 expository * Continuous presentation vs. self-paced presentation (stops at clause/sentence boundaries) * Measurement of pause times and comprehension recall * Pupillometry during task

BEHAVIORALExperiment 6: Clinical Application

* Self-Paced Sentence Comprehension * Sentences with varying syntactic complexity (active-conjoined, subject-relative, object-relative) * Continuous vs. self-paced (with pause at major clause boundary) presentation * True/false comprehension verification statements * Pupillometry measurement