Listening Effort in Cochlear Implant Users
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot applicable
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age18-75
SponsorUniversity of Minnesota
About this trial
People with hearing loss experience extra effort when listening, which can lead to severe psychological barriers to communication and social participation. Listening effort can lead to fatigue, mental strain, burnout, medical sick leave, and the need for increased time to recover from regular daily activities. This proposal aims to understand effort changes on a moment-to-moment basis during listening, how long the effort lasts, and how the planning and execution of effort is impacted by the experience of using a cochlear implant.
Eligibility criteria
This trial accepts healthy volunteersQualifiers
Be an adult between the age of 18 to 75 years
Have had normal hearing and speech/language development as a young child
For younger NH listeners: have normal audiometric thresholds below 25 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz
for cochlear implant listeners: at least 6 months experience with a cochlear implant
Disqualifiers
unable to fix gaze position
eye disease preventing typical changes in pupil dilation
lack of perceptual and productive fluency in English
Trial design
Design model
Factorial
Treatments tested in this trial
sentence manipulations
BehavioralAuditory stimuli (sentences) are manipulated to have key words masked by noise, or to have prosody (pitch contour) manipulated to be consistent or inconsistent with a specific inferred meaning. Participants repeat the sentences while a camera tracks changes in their eye movements and changes in pupil dilation.
Treatment groups
400 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groupsGroup A: Cochlear implant participantsExperimental treatment 1 intervention
Group B: Typical-hearing controlsActive comparator 1 intervention
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
Listening effort
Listening effort is inferred by measuring changes in pupil dilation linked to stimulus landmarks, as well as changes in microsaccade rate and blinks
Time frame
60 - 90 minute testing session2
Speech intelligibility
Intelligibility is scored by tallying the accuracy of spoken responses to auditory speech stimuli
Time frame
60 - 90 minute testing sessionSponsors and contacts
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Source ClinicalTrials.gov