Effortful Listening Despite Correct Responses: The Cost of Mental Repair in Sentence Recognition by Listeners With Cochlear Implants.
Matthew B Winn, Katherine H Teece
PMID 36112516WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with cochlear implants showed increased pupil dilation, a sign of mental effort, when they had to mentally repair a misheard word.
This effort happened even when their spoken response was correct. For implant users, this effort lasted longer than for people with normal hearing.
Key findings
01Pupil dilation increased significantly when participants had to mentally repair a word distorted by noise, and this effort persisted even when the final spoken response was correct.
02Compared to listeners with normal hearing, cochlear implant users showed a slower recovery of pupil dilation after hearing a mispronounced word, suggesting their mental effort lasted longer.
03The need to repair one word often caused errors on other words in the same sentence, indicating that the effort of reconstruction drains resources needed for the rest of the utterance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used carefully recorded sentences from a single talker, which may not reflect the variability of everyday conversation. Pupil dilation is an indirect measure of effort and does not capture all types of cognitive load, such as emotional or social factors. The comparison group of normal-hearing listeners came from a previous study, which introduces potential differences in testing conditions. Some participants may have missed the mispronunciations entirely, meaning the measured effort might reflect detection difficulty rather than just repair.
Declared interests
The research was supported by NIH Grant R01 DC017114. No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a cochlear implant user's accurate repetition of a sentence means they listened with ease. The study shows that effort can be high even when performance is perfect, and this effort may linger longer than it does for people with normal hearing.