Postural Control While Listening in Younger and Middle-Aged Adults.
Postural Control While Listening in Younger and Middle-Aged Adults.
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DOI：
10.1097/aud.0000000000000861
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Banks J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Helfer KS;Freyman RL;van Emmerik R;Banks J
这项研究的目的是确定一项边听边平衡的任务是否会对量化中年的听力努力敏感。这项探索性工作背后的前提是，在具有挑战性的声学条件下，姿势控制力的下降将表现出，中年人比年轻人更明显。采用双任务范式，一项任务为语音理解，另一项任务为姿势控制。在言语知觉任务中，受试者在其他句子或稳态噪音存在的情况下，听并重复返回的句子。目标和掩模在空间重合和空间分离的条件下都被呈现。姿势控制任务要求参与者以正常姿势(双脚大致与肩同宽)或串联姿势(一只脚在另一只脚后面)站在力量平台上。参与者还在每一组试验结束时对他们的主观听力努力进行了评分。当听音任务以较不利的信噪比完成时，两组受试者的姿势控制都较差。当参与者正常站立时，在双重任务条件下的姿势控制与高频听力损失的程度呈负相关，纯音阈值较高的个体表现出较差的平衡。相关分析还表明，在单任务和双任务条件下，语音识别能力的降低都与较差的姿势控制有关。与噪声相比，中年受试者在掩饰语音时表现出更大的双重任务成本。那些报告在听力任务上花费更多精力的人在正常状态下表现出更大的双重任务成本。在具有挑战性的声学条件下听会对姿势控制产生负面影响，中年人的影响比年轻人更大。对这一发现的一种解释是，在不利的环境中成功倾听所需的努力增加，导致用于维持平衡的资源减少，特别是随着人们年龄的增长。这些结果为使用这种生态上有效的双任务范式来量化在不利声学环境中理解语音的相关成本提供了初步支持。
The motivation for this research is to determine whether a listening-while-balancing task would be sensitive to quantifying listening effort in middle age. The premise behind this exploratory work is that a decrease in postural control would be demonstrated in challenging acoustic conditions, more so in middle-aged than in younger adults. A dual-task paradigm was employed with speech understanding as one task and postural control as the other. For the speech perception task, participants listened to and repeated back sentences in the presence of other sentences or steady-state noise. Targets and maskers were presented in both spatially-coincident and spatially-separated conditions. The postural control task required participants to stand on a force platform either in normal stance (with feet approximately shoulder-width apart) or in tandem stance (with one foot behind the other). Participants also rated their subjective listening effort at the end of each block of trials. Postural control was poorer for both groups of participants when the listening task was completed at a more adverse (vs. less adverse) signal-to-noise ratio. When participants were standing normally, postural control in dual-task conditions was negatively associated with degree of high-frequency hearing loss, with individuals who had higher pure-tone thresholds exhibiting poorer balance. Correlation analyses also indicated that reduced speech recognition ability was associated with poorer postural control in both single- and dual-task conditions. Middle-aged participants exhibited larger dual-task costs when the masker was speech, as compared to when it was noise. Individuals who reported expending greater effort on the listening task exhibited larger dual-task costs when in normal stance. Listening under challenging acoustic conditions can have a negative impact on postural control, more so in middle-aged than in younger adults. One explanation for this finding is that the increased effort required to successfully listen in adverse environments leaves fewer resources for maintaining balance, particularly as people age. These results provide preliminary support for using this type of ecologically-valid dual-task paradigm to quantify the costs associated with understanding speech in adverse acoustic environments.