Variations Within Normal Hearing Acuity and Speech Comprehension: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Purpose Many young adults with a mild hearing loss can appear unaware or unconcerned about their loss or its potential effects. A question that has not been raised in prior research is whether slight variability, even within the range of clinically normal hearing, may have a detrimental effect on comprehension of spoken sentences, especially when attempting to understand the meaning of sentences that offer an additional cognitive challenge. The purpose of this study was to address this question. Method An exploratory analysis was conducted on data from 3 published studies that included young adults, ages 18 to 29 years, with audiometrically normal hearing acuity (pure-tone average < 15 dB HL) tested for comprehension of sentences that conveyed the sentence meaning with simpler or more complex linguistic structures. A product–moment correlation was conducted between individuals' hearing acuity and their comprehension accuracy. Results A significant correlation appeared between hearing acuity and comprehension accuracy for syntactically complex sentences, but not for sentences with a simpler syntactic structure. Partial correlations confirmed this relationship to hold independent of participant age within this relatively narrow age range. Conclusion These findings suggest that slight elevations in hearing thresholds, even among young adults who pass a screen for normal hearing, can affect comprehension accuracy for spoken sentences when combined with cognitive demands imposed by sentences that convey their meaning with a complex linguistic structure. These findings support limited resource models of attentional allocation and argue for routine baseline hearing evaluations of young adults with current age-normal hearing acuity.

An auditory processing advantage enables communication in less complex social settings: Signs of an extreme female brain in children and adolescents being assessed for Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Difficulties within language and flexibility have previously been identified as risk factors impacting ODD in TD boys, whereas only flexibility was identified as a risk factor in TD girls (Kerekes et al, 2014). As elasticity is a measure of flexibility and auditory acuity is associated with speech comprehension (Lee et al, 2018;Ayasse et al, 2019), our results are in line with previous research as far as the male correlations go. However, in the female group, a higher performance in visual flexibility is associated with ODD rather than a lower performance.…”

“…This is in line with our hypothesis of ASD females showing the same unisensory processing advantage in social communication as is seen in previous studies of TD women (McGivern et al, 2019;Siedlecki et al, 2019;Thornton et al, 2019). Auditory Acuity has previously been associated with language comprehension (Lee et al, 2018;Ayasse et al, 2019) so, a process such as language, heavily relying on auditory information will naturally be favored by those having a superior auditory processing. However, in the male group, a better performance in Auditory Acuity was associated with less rated problems of ODD (r = −0.613, p = 0.005; Figure 2), which is in line with our hypothesis of males having a superior visual processing blocking out auditory information.…”

“…An extreme female brain would then be characterized by a superior auditory acuity. Auditory acuity has previously been associated with speech comprehension as well as the development of language and social communication (Lee et al, 2018;Ayasse et al, 2019). In a study from 2017, a better signal-detection ability was seen in people with ASD using camouflaging strategies (Lai et al, 2017;Parish-Morris et al, 2017).…”

Individual Differences in Peripheral Hearing and Cognition Reveal Sentence Processing Differences in Healthy Older Adults

“…Nevertheless, we found a significant relationship between hearing thresholds and ERP amplitudes in the RRC paradigm. A study by Ayasse et al ( 2019 ) found that even in young adults who pass a screen for normal hearing, slightly elevated hearing thresholds detrimentally affected processing of difficult syntactic constructions. This suggests that it is important to consider hearing thresholds as continuous variables rather than considering people within certain threshold ranges as homogeneous groups.…”

“…First, we chose peripheral hearing loss as measured by hearing thresholds. Hearing loss is highly prevalent in older adults—approximately 20% at age 60 and 50% at age 70 (Goman and Lin, 2016 ; Bisgaard and Ruf, 2017 ; Mick et al, 2019 )—and hearing thresholds have been shown to influence many behavioral results in previous studies (Wingfield et al, 2006 ; DeCaro et al, 2016 ; DeDe and Flax, 2016 ), even in young adults (Ayasse et al, 2019 ).…”