title: The effects of age and hearing impairment on the extraction of listening effort correlates.
abstract: In clinical practice, an objective method to assess listening effort is still not available. The benefit of such a measure would be to reduce the listening effort in hearing impaired persons by an adequate adaption of their personal hearing aids. In foregoing studies, we have shown that the wavelet phase synchronization stability (WPSS) of auditory late responses (ALRs) could serve as a feasible measure of listening effort. Here, tonal and noise embedded syllabic paradigms were employed to achieve ALR sequences in normal hearing subjects. The aims of this ongoing study were 1) to extract the WPSS of ALR sequences in hearing impaired persons, middle-aged normal hearing persons and younger normal hearing subjects, 2) to investigate possible age-related influences on the WPSS and 3) to examine a feasible influence of the hearing loss on the WPSS. It is concluded, that the WPSS of ALR sequences can be extracted in normal hearing as well as in hearing impaired persons. An age related effect regarding the WPSS was not noticeable and the intergroup comparison of the difference of the WPSS showed a tendency to be larger for the hearing impaired compared to the normal hearing middle-aged subjects. The latest can be interpreted that this subject group showed a larger effort to solve the auditory paradigms.
authors.affiliation: Systems Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Unit at the Neurocenter, Saarland University Hospital and Saarland University of Applied Sciences, Homburg/Saar, Germany. fbernarding@snn-unit.de
authors.forename: Corinna
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bernarding
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Strauss
authors.forename: Ronny
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hannemann
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Latzel
authors.forename: Harald
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Seidler
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Jobst
authors.forename: Ahmed
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bellagnech
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Landwehr
authors.forename: Farah I
authors.initials: FI
authors.lastname: Corona-Strauss
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging; D000465:Algorithms; D001288:Attention; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013067:Speech Perception