Speech Perception With High Cognitive Demand

Summary

With advancing age, adults experience increasing speech understanding difficulties in challenging situations. Currently, speech-in-noise difficulties are rehabilitated by providing hearing aids. For older normal-hearing adults, however, hearing devices do not provide much benefit since these adults do not have a decreased hearing sensitivity. The goal of the "Speech Perception with High Cognitive Demand" Project is to evaluate the benefit of a new auditory-cognitive training paradigm. In order to provide maximal benefit for older, normal-hearing adults, a validation of the new training materials is required. In a pilot study, the investigators will evaluate the new auditory-cognitive training paradigm in 15 young, normal-hearing adults (18-30 years). Based on these results, the training paradigm can be further optimized for older adults.

Conditions

• Speech Intelligibility
• Aging

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Auditory-cognitive training paradigm

The investigators developed an American English version of the Nottingham (UK) PLUS training paradigm in which listeners are asked to focus and listen to one speaker while ignoring another speaker. The paradigm is designed to optimally enhance the possibility of benefit: an adaptive procedure is employed in order to train each individual at their own level and to make the task challenging. A short-term memory component was also added to the original training paradigm, to enhance the cognitive skills of our participants. To provide maximal speech-in-noise benefit for older, normal-hearing adults, a validation of our new training materials is required. The investigators will evaluate this in young, normal-hearing adults (18-30 years) by studying our outcome measure (speech reception threshold) for the different sentence-scenarios and test-retest sessions.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institute on Aging (NIA)

  collaborator NIH

• University of Maryland, College Park

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Samira B Anderson, PhD · University of Maryland, College Park

• Jonathan Z Simon, PhD · University of Maryland, College Park

• Stefanie E Kuchinsky, PhD · Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

30 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-04-09

Primary Completion

2021-06-30

Completion

2021-07-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations