NCT05584514

Effects of Listening Effort on Sentence Processing and Memory (Study 1)

Completed NA Last updated 18 November 2023

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Sentence Stimulus in Sentence Stimulus in 80 participants. Completed in 30 August 2023.

Timeline

1 January 2022

Primary endpoint
30 August 2023

30 August 2023

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	University of Utah
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	na
Design	single group
Masking	none
Primary purpose	basic science
Enrollment	80
Start date	1 January 2022
Primary completion	30 August 2023
Estimated completion	30 August 2023
Sites	1 location across United States

Drugs / interventions tested

• Sentence Stimulus
• Auditory Noise

Conditions studied

• Sentence Stimulus — all drugs for Sentence Stimulus →
• Auditory Noise — all drugs for Auditory Noise →

Sponsor

University of Utah

Who can join

Adults 60 to 90, any sex, with Sentence Stimulus or Auditory Noise. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

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 we elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of LE and its consequences for speech comprehension. In this project, we adopt a multi-method approach, combining methods from clinical audiology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience to address this gap of knowledge. Specifically, we 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 acoustic challenge and LE 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 acoustic challenge and LE in age-related SNHL.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.