Hearing-Impaired Listeners Show Reduced Attention to High-Frequency Information in the Presence of Low-Frequency Information.
Elin Roverud, Judy R Dubno, Gerald Kidd
PMID 32853117WHAT IT FOUND
Compared with normal-hearing young adults, those with hearing loss showed a larger drop in accuracy for high-frequency tone sequences when low-frequency sequences played at the same time.
This drop remained when they were told to focus on the high tones.
Key findings
01Listeners with hearing loss showed a larger drop in pattern-discrimination accuracy for high-frequency targets than for low-frequency targets when both frequencies were presented together.
02Normal-hearing listeners did not show this frequency bias.
03The bias remained when listeners were told in advance which frequency to attend.
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 only 12 normal-hearing and 12 hearing-impaired young adults, so it cannot show how older adults or clients with other hearing profiles would perform. The task used pure-tone patterns, not real-world listening situations. Quiet performance did not always reach the targeted 90% correct, and some individual results required extrapolation. Two hearing-loss listeners showed possible masking effects; excluding them changed the selective attention result. Not all hearing-loss listeners could be tested for dead regions. The paper did not identify the cause of the bias; possible factors such as consistent hearing aid use were not explored.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The supplied text does not report author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that hearing loss makes listeners ignore high-frequency information generally or that amplification will remove the bias. The study used pure-tone patterns and did not test amplification or training.