Implementing Ecological Momentary Assessment in Audiological Research: Opportunities and Challenges.

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a way to evaluate experiences in everyday life. It is a powerful research tool but can be complex and challenging for beginners. Application of EMA in audiological research brings with it opportunities and challenges that differ from other research disciplines.

Uses of Linguistic Context in Speech Listening: Does Acquired Hearing Loss Lead to Reduced Engagement of Prediction?

Research investigating the complex interplay of cognitive mechanisms involved in speech listening for people with hearing loss has been gaining prominence. In particular, linguistic context allows the use of several cognitive mechanisms that are not well distinguished in hearing science, namely those relating to "postdiction", "integration", and "prediction". We offer the perspective that an unacknowledged impact of hearing loss is the differential use of predictive mechanisms relative to age-matched individuals with normal hearing.

Used to Be a Dime, Now It's a Dollar: Revised Speech Perception in Noise Key Word Predictability Revisited 40 Years On.

Purpose: Almost 40 years after its development, in this article, we reexamine the relevance and validity of the ubiquitously used Revised Speech Perception in Noise (R-SPiN) sentence corpus. The R-SPiN corpus includes "high-context" and "low-context" sentences and has been widely used in the field of hearing research to examine the benefit derived from semantic context across English-speaking listeners, but research investigating age differences has yielded somewhat inconsistent findings. We assess the appropriateness of the corpus for use today in different English-language cultures (i.

Previous Mental Load and Incentives Influence Anticipatory Arousal as Indexed by the Baseline Pupil Diameter in a Speech-in-Noise Task.

Listening effort and fatigue are common experiences when conversing in noisy environments. Much research has investigated listening effort in relation to listening demand using the speech-in-noise paradigm. Recent conceptualizations of listening effort postulate that mental fatigue should result in decreased arousal and a reluctance to invest further effort, particularly when the effort is not worthwhile.

Fitting a Hearing Aid on the Better Ear, Worse Ear, or Both: Associations of Hearing-aid Fitting Laterality with Outcomes in a Large Sample of US Veterans.

Longitudinal electronic health records from a large sample of new hearing-aid (HA) recipients in the US Veterans Affairs healthcare system were used to evaluate associations of fitting laterality with long-term HA use persistence as measured by battery order records, as well as with short-term HA use and satisfaction as assessed using the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA), completed within 180 days of HA fitting. The large size of our dataset allowed us to address two aspects of fitting laterality that have not received much attention, namely the degree of hearing asymmetry and the question of which ear to fit if fitting unilaterally. The key findings were that long-term HA use persistence was considerably lower for unilateral fittings for symmetric hearing loss (HL) and for unilateral worse-ear fittings for asymmetric HL, as compared to bilateral and unilateral better-ear fittings.

Listening efficiency in adult cochlear-implant users compared with normally-hearing controls at ecologically relevant signal-to-noise ratios.

Introduction: Due to having to work with an impoverished auditory signal, cochlear-implant (CI) users may experience reduced speech intelligibility and/or increased listening effort in real-world listening situations, compared to their normally-hearing (NH) peers. These two challenges to perception may be usefully integrated in a measure of listening efficiency: conceptually, the amount of accuracy achieved for a certain amount of effort expended.

Methods: We describe a novel approach to quantifying listening efficiency based on the rate of evidence accumulation toward a correct response in a linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model of choice decision-making.

Combining Multiple Psychophysiological Measures of Listening Effort: Challenges and Recommendations.

About one-third of all recently published studies on listening effort have used at least one physiological measure, providing evidence of the popularity of such measures in listening effort research. However, the specific measures employed, as well as the rationales used to justify their inclusion, vary greatly between studies, leading to a literature that is fragmented and difficult to integrate. A unified approach that assesses multiple psychophysiological measures justified by a single rationale would be preferable because it would advance our understanding of listening effort.

Exploring listening-related fatigue in children with and without hearing loss using self-report and parent-proxy measures.

Children with hearing loss appear to experience greater fatigue than children with normal hearing (CNH). Listening-related fatigue is often associated with an increase in effortful listening or difficulty in listening situations. This has been observed in children with bilateral hearing loss (CBHL) and, more recently, in children with unilateral hearing loss (CUHL).

Dementia and hearing-aid use: a two-way street.

Objectives: Hearing-aid use may reduce risk of dementia, but cognitive impairment makes use more challenging. An observed association between reduced hearing-aid use and incident dementia could reflect either or both of these causal paths. The objective was to examine the effects of each path while minimising contamination between paths.

A qualitative investigation of the hearing and hearing-aid related emotional states experienced by adults with hearing loss.

Objective: Despite previous research into the psychosocial impact of hearing loss, little detail is known regarding the hearing and hearing-aid-related emotional states experienced by adults with hearing loss in everyday life, and how they occur.

Design: Individual remote semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and qualitatively analysed with reflexive and inductive thematic analysis.

Study Sample: Seventeen participants (9 female) with hearing loss (age range 44-74 years) participated.

Conversation success in one-to-one and group conversation: a group concept mapping study of adults with normal and impaired hearing.

Objective: The concept of conversation success is undefined, although prior work has variously related it to accurate exchange of information, alignment between interlocutors, and good management of misunderstandings. This study aimed (1) to identify factors of conversation success and (2) to explore the importance of these factors in one-to-one versus group conversations.

Design: Group concept mapping method was applied.

Smartphone App-Based Noncontact Ecological Momentary Assessment With Experienced and Naïve Older Participants: Feasibility Study.

Background: Smartphone app-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) without face-to-face contact between researcher and participant (app-based noncontact EMA) potentially provides a valuable data collection tool when geographic, time, and situational factors (eg, COVID-19 restrictions) place constraints on in-person research. Nevertheless, little is known about the feasibility of this method, particularly in older and naïve EMA participants.

Objective: This study aims to assess the feasibility of app-based noncontact EMA as a function of previous EMA experience, by recruiting and comparing a group of participants who had never participated in EMA before against a group of participants who had been part of an earlier in-person EMA study, and age, by recruiting middle-aged to older adults.

Dataset of British English speech recordings for psychoacoustics and speech processing research: The clarity speech corpus.

This paper presents the Clarity Speech Corpus, a publicly available, forty speaker British English speech dataset. The corpus was created for the purpose of running listening tests to gauge speech intelligibility and quality in the Clarity Project, which has the goal of advancing speech signal processing by hearing aids through a series of challenges. The dataset is suitable for machine learning and other uses in speech and hearing technology, acoustics and psychoacoustics.

The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech.

Objectives: In the personalisation of hearing-aid fittings, gain is often adjusted to suit patient preferences using live speech. When using brief sentences as stimuli, the minimum gain adjustments necessary to elicit consistent preferences ("preference thresholds") were previously found to be much greater than typical adjustments in current practice. The current study examined the role of duration on preference thresholds.

Hearing Aids Reduce Daily-Life Fatigue and Increase Social Activity: A Longitudinal Study.

People with hearing loss experience fatigue, and it is unknown whether this is alleviated by treatment with hearing aids. The objective of this study was to address this issue and to investigate the possible concomitant effect of hearing-aid fitting on activity levels. An intervention group ( = 53) who were due to be fitted with their first-ever hearing aid(s) and a control group ( = 53) who had hearing loss but no change in hearing aid status-completed a battery of self-report outcome measures four times: once before fitting, and at 2 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months post fitting.

Changes in Orientation Behavior due to Extended High-Frequency (5 to 10 kHz) Spatial Cues.

Objectives: Current hearing aids have a limited bandwidth, which limits the intelligibility and quality of their output, and inhibits their uptake. Recent advances in signal processing, as well as novel methods of transduction, allow for a greater useable frequency range. Previous studies have shown a benefit for this extended bandwidth in consonant recognition, talker-sex identification, and separating sound sources.

Electronic Health Records As a Platform for Audiological Research: Data Validity, Patient Characteristics, and Hearing-Aid Use Persistence Among 731,213 U.S. Veterans.

Objectives: This article presents a summary of audiological, general health, and hearing aid (HA) outcome data in a large sample of U.S. Veterans receiving HAs.

A Measure of Long-Term Hearing Aid Use Persistence Based on Battery Reordering Data.

Objective: We describe the construction of a hearing aid long-term use persistence measure based on battery reorder data. The measure is derived from the notion that hearing aid users keep using their devices for some time after placing a battery order.

Design: A hearing aid user is defined as persistent at time T if they placed a battery order within a time span W preceding T.

Can listening-related fatigue influence well-being? Examining associations between hearing loss, fatigue, activity levels and well-being.

Objective: Well-being is influenced by the activities we undertake. Hearing loss may reduce well-being directly through increased listening-related fatigue due to cognitive and emotional strain in challenging situations. Hearing loss and hearing device use may also indirectly impact fatigue and well-being by altering the frequency and type of daily-life activities.

Daily-Life Fatigue in Mild to Moderate Hearing Impairment: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.

Objectives: Previous research has indicated an association between hearing impairment (HI) and daily-life fatigue. However, the temporal and contextual correlates of such fatigue are largely unexplored. The present study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine (1) whether people with HI are more fatigued than people with normal hearing, (2) whether individuals with HI and normal hearing (NH) show similar diurnal patterns of fatigue, (3) whether people with HI spend less time in challenging listening situations compared with NH controls, and (4) whether more challenging listening situations are associated with more fatigue and whether hearing ability influences any observed association.

Covid-19 Lockdown Affects Hearing Disability and Handicap in Diverse Ways: A Rapid Online Survey Study.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to explore the perceived effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) social distancing restrictions and safety measures on people with hearing loss.

Design: Participants were 129 adults (48.1% female, mean age 64.

The Quest for Ecological Validity in Hearing Science: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Advance It.

Ecological validity is a relatively new concept in hearing science. It has been cited as relevant with increasing frequency in publications over the past 20 years, but without any formal conceptual basis or clear motive. The sixth Eriksholm Workshop was convened to develop a deeper understanding of the concept for the purpose of applying it in hearing research in a consistent and productive manner.