1Research Group Experimental Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Department of Neurosciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; and 2Cochlear Technology Centre Belgium, Mechelen, Belgium.
Ear Hear. 2017 Sep/Oct;38(5):568-576. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000436.
A reliable and practical measure of listening effort is crucial in the aural rehabilitation of children with communication disorders. In this article, we propose a novel behavioral paradigm designed to measure listening effort in school-age children based on different depths and levels of verbal processing. The paradigm consists of a classic word recognition task performed in quiet and in noise coupled to one of three additional tasks asking the children to judge the color of simple pictures or a certain semantic category of the presented words. The response time (RT) from the categorization tasks is considered the primary indicator of listening effort.
The listening effort paradigm was evaluated in a group of 31 normal-hearing, normal-developing children 7 to 12 years of age. A total of 146 Dutch nouns were selected for the experiment after surveying 14 local Dutch-speaking children. Windows-based custom software was developed to administer the behavioral paradigm from a conventional laptop computer. A separate touch screen was used as a response interface to gather the RT data from the participants. Verbal repetition of each presented word was scored by the tester and a percentage-correct word recognition score (WRS) was calculated for each condition. Randomized lists of target words were presented in one of three signal to noise ratios (SNR) to examine the effect of background noise on the two outcome measures of WRS and RT. Three novel categorization tasks, each corresponding to a different depth or elaboration level of semantic processing, were developed to examine the effect of processing level on either WRS or RT. It was hypothesized that, while listening effort as measured by RT would be affected by both noise and processing level, WRS performance would be affected by changes in noise level only. The RT measure was also hypothesized to increase more from an increase in noise level in categorization conditions demanding a deeper or more elaborate form of semantic processing.
There was a significant effect of SNR level on school-age children's WRS: their word recognition performance tended to decrease with increasing background noise level. However, depth of processing did not seem to affect WRS. Moreover, a repeated-measure analysis of variance fitted to transformed RT data revealed that this measure of listening effort in normal-hearing school-age children was significantly affected by both SNR level and the depth of semantic processing. There was no significant interaction between noise level and the type of categorization task with regard to RT.
The observed patterns of WRS and RT supported the hypotheses regarding the effects of background noise and depth of processing on word recognition performance and a behavioral measure of listening effort. The magnitude of noise-induced change in RT did not differ between categorization tasks, however. Our findings point to future research directions regarding the potential effects of age, working memory capacity, and cross-modality interaction when measuring listening effort in different levels of semantic processing.
在儿童沟通障碍的听觉康复中，可靠且实用的听力努力测量方法至关重要。本文提出了一种新的行为范式，旨在基于不同深度和水平的言语处理来测量学龄儿童的听力努力。该范式由在安静和噪声环境下执行的经典单词识别任务以及三个附加任务组成，要求儿童判断简单图片的颜色或呈现单词的某个语义类别。分类任务的反应时间（RT）被认为是听力努力的主要指标。
本听力努力范式在一组 31 名正常听力、正常发育的 7 至 12 岁儿童中进行了评估。在对 14 名当地讲荷兰语的儿童进行调查后，选择了 146 个荷兰名词用于实验。基于 Windows 的定制软件用于从传统笔记本电脑上管理行为范式。单独的触摸屏用作响应接口，以从参与者处收集 RT 数据。测试员对每个呈现单词进行口头重复，并为每个条件计算出正确单词识别得分（WRS）。随机呈现目标词列表，以三种信噪比（SNR）之一呈现，以检查背景噪声对两个结果测量（WRS 和 RT）的影响。开发了三个新的分类任务，每个任务对应于语义处理的不同深度或细致程度，以检查处理水平对 WRS 或 RT 的影响。假设 RT 作为听力努力的衡量标准，不仅会受到噪声和处理水平的影响，而且 WRS 性能仅会受到噪声水平变化的影响。还假设，在需要更深入或更细致的语义处理形式的分类条件下，噪声水平的增加会使 RT 测量值增加更多。
信噪比水平对学龄儿童的 WRS 有显著影响：他们的单词识别性能随着背景噪声水平的增加而下降。然而，处理深度似乎并未影响 WRS。此外，对转换后的 RT 数据进行重复测量方差分析表明，正常听力学龄儿童的这种听力努力测量方法受到 SNR 水平和语义处理深度的显著影响。RT 与噪声水平和分类任务类型之间没有显著的相互作用。
观察到的 WRS 和 RT 模式支持关于背景噪声和处理深度对单词识别性能和听力努力行为测量的影响的假设。然而，分类任务之间的噪声引起的 RT 变化幅度没有差异。我们的研究结果指出了未来的研究方向，即当在不同的语义处理水平下测量听力努力时，需要考虑年龄、工作记忆容量和跨模态相互作用的潜在影响。
