Speech Perception Training: Advanced Scoring and Feedback Methods

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Older adults commonly experience hearing difficulties in noisy settings, whether or not their hearing thresholds have increased. Being able to see the person who is talking can significantly ameliorate their hearing difficulties, but the magnitude of the benefit depends greatly on each person’s lipreading ability. Unfortunately, the vast majority of older adults who have had normal hearing during most of their lives are poor lipreaders. With Phase- I SBIR funding, SeeHear LLC realized a web-based speech recognition training system to improve lipreading. The training system implements unique high-contingency feedback following open set recognition responses during training with isolated sentences. High-contingency feedback informs the trainee about the relationship between their perceptual errors and the stimulus at the level of words or phonemes, a key to perceptual learning. Typical software for training with connected speech stimuli provides low-contingency feedback: The feedback does not establish a relationship between the stimulus and the trainee’s perceptual response errors. High- contingency feedback increases lipreading accuracy and speech recognition with audiovisual stimuli in noise in younger normal-hearing (NH) adults. This training approach will be evaluated with older hearing-impaired participants, and it will be extended beyond lipreading training to audiovisual speech recognition training in a noisy background. A second, highly novel, but potentially effective and efficient training paradigm will also be evaluated. This second approach uses a paired associates learning task, in which trainees learn to associate spoken nonsense words with nonsense pictures. The task is designed to encourage trainees to attend closely to the spoken nonsense words while trying to learn the word-to-picture associations. Laboratory testing with younger NH adults shows that lipreading training with this paradigm can deliver significant generalization to lipreading with new stimuli and a new talker. This paradigm will be tested with older adults and will be extended to offer audiovisual training in noise. The proposed project comprises randomized controlled-trial clinical tests and additional training system development. There will be a wait-list control group for comparison to groups assigned to train with sentence stimuli and high- or low-contingency feedback for open set sentence lipreading or audiovisual recognition. Two additional groups will train in the paired associates paradigm: One group will carry out training by lipreading the stimuli, and the other group will carry out training with audiovisual stimuli in speech-shaped noise. All of the participants in the research will undergo laboratory pre- and post-training tests that are designed to determine whether learning during the training sessions generalizes to different speech perception tasks, different stimuli, and different talkers across different modalities (lipreading, auditory-only, and audiovisual speech with acoustic signals in noise). In order to carry out all of the proposed training research and data recovery, the web-based system will be expanded. Successful completion of this Phase-II project will directly support commercialization of the training system.