Leveraging cognitive event-processing approaches to better assess speech-comprehension difficulties in age-related hearing loss
Description: Hearing loss affects about 40% of adults over 60 and is a huge risk factor for dementia, but it is often diagnosed decades after individuals start having difficulty comprehending speech in noisy situations. Standard hearing tests do not capture such difficulties, because they assess threshold sound-audibility or verbatim word-report for disconnected sentences, while missing the cognitive processes essential for real-life speech listening. Everyday speech is suprathreshold and often follows a coherent narrative for which mental representations are not verbatim but reflect larger meaningful units that integrate gist across many sentences. We hypothesize that a deficit in mentally organizing speech into meaningful units underlies older adults' real-life speech-comprehension difficulties, as suggested by their common reports that following the thread of a conversation in noise is hard. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a sensitive and robust way to assess comprehension difficulties with everyday speech by leveraging cognitive frameworks that are concerned with the mental segmentation and memory formation of everyday environments. We will test younger adults, older adults with or without hearing loss, and older adult hearing-aid users to better understand how hearing loss affects the identification and recall of meaningful units for speech masked by noise, how speech segmentation relates to verbatim word-report (intelligibility), how hearing-loss treatment affects speech segmentation and recall, and how hearing loss affects brain networks that support speech segmentation. By bridging the gap between cognitive processing frameworks and hearing sciences, our novel approach aims to deliver clinically meaningful tests of speech-comprehension difficulties in older adults, enabling earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment of hearing loss. The research also has broader implications, offering insights into the link between hearing loss and memory function.
Amount: CA$837,700
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: Project Grant
Start date: 2024-10-01
End date: 2029-09-30
Investigator: Bjorn Herrmann
Institution: Baycrest Academy for Research and Education (Toronto, ON)
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: 195994_1
OpenAlex ID: G3699954271