Perception of Speech in Context by Listeners With Healthy and Impaired Hearing

Status: Recruiting
Location: See all (2) locations...
Intervention Type: Behavioral
Study Type: Interventional
Study Phase: Not Applicable
SUMMARY

Recognition of speech sounds is accomplished through the use of adjacent sounds in time, in what is termed acoustic context. The frequency and temporal properties of these contextual sounds play a large role in recognition of human speech. Historically, most research on both speech perception and sound perception in general examine sounds out-of-context, or presented individually. Further, these studies have been conducted independently of each other with little connection across labs, across sounds, etc. These approaches slow the progress in understanding how listeners with hearing difficulties use context to recognize speech and how their hearing aids and/or cochlear implants might be modified to improve their perception. This research has three main goals. First, the investigators predict that performance in speech sound recognition experiments will be related when testing the same speech frequencies or the same moments in time, but that performance will not be related in further comparisons across speech frequencies or at different moments in time. Second, the investigators predict that adding background noise will make this contextual speech perception more difficult, and that these difficulties will be more severe for listeners with hearing loss. Third, the investigators predict that cochlear implant users will also use surrounding sounds in their speech recognition, but with key differences than healthy-hearing listeners owing to the sound processing done by their implants. In tandem with these goals, the investigators will use computer models to simulate how neurons respond to speech sounds individually and when surrounded by other sounds.

Eligibility
Participation Requirements
Sex: All
Minimum Age: 18
Maximum Age: 65
Healthy Volunteers: t
View:

• Be able to recognize spoken words in English

• Be a competent speaker of north American English

• Be an adult between the age of 18 to 65 years

• Have normal audiometric thresholds below 25 decibels hearing loss (dB HL) at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz OR have audiometric thresholds not exceeding 40 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz OR have audiometric thresholds not exceeding 55 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz OR use a cochlear implant

• Lack language-learning or other cognitive disabilities

Locations
United States
Minnesota
University of Minnesota
RECRUITING
Minneapolis
Wisconsin
Marquette University
RECRUITING
Milwaukee
Contact Information
Primary
Christian Stilp, PhD
christian.stilp@marquette.edu
4142881455
Time Frame
Start Date: 2023-09-19
Estimated Completion Date: 2027-08-31
Participants
Target number of participants: 680
Treatments
Experimental: Speech perception experiments
This arm involves experiments wherein participants listen to speech played at comfortable volumes and respond by indicating what they heard either in open-ended form or by choosing among a set of options displayed on a computer.
Related Therapeutic Areas
Sponsors
Leads: Marquette University
Collaborators: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

This content was sourced from clinicaltrials.gov