Peripheral sensory loss of presbycusis affects not only speech perception but also language-cognitive information processing required for sentence compression. Especially in tasks that require a lot of cognitive ability, the speech compression will fa...
Peripheral sensory loss of presbycusis affects not only speech perception but also language-cognitive information processing required for sentence compression. Especially in tasks that require a lot of cognitive ability, the speech compression will fall. This means that the comprehension of the elderly may differ in their ability to understand speech depending on the syntactic complexity of the sentence and the difference in required cognitive ability. Presbycusis can improve their speech recognition by wearing hearing aids, which leads to listening efforts for listening and understanding speech sounds. Therefore, this study attempted to investigate the listening efforts of the elderly and the speech comprehension according to the wearing period by dividing the wearing of hearing aids by period through various tasks.
This study was conducted with 30 hearing aid wearers over 65 years of age. According to the wearing period, groups were formed of less than 1 year, more than 1 year and less than 3 years, and more than 3 years, and in order to examine the speech comprehension, the speech recognition task (speaking according to meaningless syllables, speaking according to sentences) and the sentence comprehension task (following auditory instructions, listening to stories and answering tasks) were analyzed.
The results of this study are summarized as follows.
First, in the speech recognition task to examine the speech comprehension, the overall performance of the presbycusis group who wore hearing aids for less than 1 year was significantly lower than that of the presbycusis group for more than 3 years wearing hearing aids. In the presbycusis group less than 1 year and the presbycusis group less than 1 year and less than 3 years, significant differences were found in the speech task according to the meaningless syllables.
Second, in the sentence comprehension task to examine the speech comprehension, the performance of the presbycusis group for more than 3 years of hearing aid wearing was significantly higher than that of the presbycusis group for less than 1 year of hearing aid wearing.
Third, as a result of examining the relationship between listening efforts according to the hearing aid wearing period, there was a significant decrease in listening efforts between the presbycusis group for less than 1 year of hearing aid wearing and the presbycusis group for more than 3 years of hearing aid wearing.
Fourth, as a result of examining the correlation between the speech comprehension task and listening effort according to the hearing aid wearing period, there were 72% and 82% positive correlations between the speaking task according to sentences and the listening and answering task in the presbycusis group less than 1 year of hearing aid wearing. In the presbycusis group for more than 1 year and less than 3 years of hearing aid wearing, there was a 75% positive correlation between the speaking task according to sentences and the listening task. In the presbycusis group for more than 3 years of hearing aid wearing, there was no correlation between the speech recognition task and the sentence comprehension task, but there was an 80% negative correlation between the speaking task and listening effort according to the sentence.
Based on the above results, it was possible to confirm the speech comprehension of the elderly according to the hearing aid wearing period through various tasks, and the longer the wearing month, the lower the degree of listening effort, indicating the difference between the performance of the speech comprehension task and listening effort according to the input period of auditory stimulation. Therefore, these results are thought to be used as a clinical guide for hearing rehabilitation targeting presbycusis.