Details

Session Overview: Hearing loss is typically diagnosed long after real-world limitations, such as finding speech comprehension effortful in the presence of background sound, are first noticed. Clinical tests of speech perception are limited because they typically focus on speech intelligibility and not on how hard a listener has to work to achieve that level of intelligibility. Such listening effort may be evident years before intelligibility declines appear. Progress on measuring listening effort has been slow because the concept is ill defined, the materials typically used to measure it (simple sentences) are not very interesting and may not motivate effortful listening the way that richer narratives do. Relating listening effort to the cognitive-neuroscience literature on cognitive processes and underlying brain networks will enable us to leverage existing knowledge to better understand the concept, and so to accelerate development of sensitive and efficient tests.

 

Presenter(s): Professor Ingrid Johnsrude

 

Event: Trans Tasman Conference 2020