Beschreibung
The role of cognitive abilities in hearing and speech recognition of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired persons is an important topic in audiology. Especially for un-/aided listening situations in complex environments, there is a lack of evidence which specific cognitive abilities play a role and how this is affected by hearing aid use. The 3-years-project CARS therefor focuses on the question how hearing aid use interacts with the engagement of specific cognitive functions in complex listening situations. Starting point of the project is the KOMUS study (Kognitive und multisensorische Faktoren erfolgreichen Sprachverstehens) in which 223 participants were tested in terms of audiological issues (pure-tone and speech audiometry), balance, cognition and a number of sensory performance tasks (e.g., visual acuity, tactile perception). As not being part of the initial project, extensive statistical analyses of some of the KOMUS data are outstanding or were not finished yet. This also concerns the analysis of speech recognition data and its relation to cognitive abilities. In a first step, the KOMUS data should be used in a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to show how speech recognition is related to general and specific cognitive abilities and how this relationship is moderated by age, hearing loss and aiding. In parallel, a follow-up survey of the participants that took part in KOMUS between 2015 and 2017 will be performed focusing on hearing aid use and development of cognitive decline. It is hypothesised that the current aiding status of the participants could be predicted retrospectively from the earlier outcome measures. In the third part of the project, an experimental study will be conducted to examine the interaction of hearing aid use and cognitive functions in speech recognition. The aim of this study is the identification of cognitive abilities that are crucial for aided speech recognition in complex listening situations. A participant group with precisely defined hearing and health condition will prospectively be recruited based on the follow-up survey of the KOMUS study. As a long-term goal, knowledge about the cognitive involvement in aided listening situations may help to develop a screening test that enables audiologists to assess the individual’s cognitive abilities in a hearing-related task. The results of such a test could be used to identify individual listening strategies of the patients and give a hint for whom a cognitive training would be fruitful.