מאמץ האזנה בקרב לקויי שמיעה

Auditory function assessment of hearing-impaired individuals does not provide information regarding the listening effort. The current study examines listening efforts in hearing impaired: unilateral hearing loss (experiment 1) and bilateralcochlear implant (CI) recipients (experiment 2) as compared to normal hearing (NH)participants. 52 young adults participate in the two studies. In the first experiment,10 participants with unilateral hearing loss and 10 NH performed dual-task (speech perception and visual) and self-report questionnaire. In the second experiment twelve bilateral CI users and 20 NH peers listened to a set of sentences and were asked to repeat the final word of the sentence and, at the end of the set, were asked to recall the recognized words. This task was conducted with unilateral hearing and with bilateral hearing. Participants also completed auditory digit span, and visual attention tasks. The main findings of the first experiment were: (1) No differences between speech perception as single task compared to dual-task for both groups,(2) A decrease in percent correct for the visual task as single task compared to dual-task for both groups and (3) Significant differences between the groups in a self-report questionnaire. Findings of the second experiment: (1) no differences between unilateral and bilateral hearing in ‘recognition’ scores for both groups; (2)a significant decrease in recall performance for unilateral hearing, compared to bilateral hearing, for CI users; and (3) highly positive correlation between digit span and recalled words. The findings of the experiments demonstrate that there is a need for a suitable measure of listening effort including behavioral task and self-report questionnaire as they reflect the different dimensions of it .