RECRUITING Not applicable ClinicalTrials.gov

Listening Effort in Cochlear Implant Users

Sponsor: University of Minnesota • ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT06516575

Registry updated: 2026-08-25

Recruiting for Similar Conditions?

Sponsors are looking for patients like you. See if you qualify for compensated research studies.

Description

People with hearing loss experience extra effort when listening, which can lead to severe psychological barriers to communication and social participation. Listening effort can lead to fatigue, mental strain, burnout, medical sick leave, and the need for increased time to recover from regular daily activities. This proposal aims to understand effort changes on a moment-to-moment basis during listening, how long the effort lasts, and how the planning and execution of effort is impacted by the experience of using a cochlear implant.

Interventions

sentence manipulations (Behavioral)
Auditory stimuli (sentences) are manipulated to have key words masked by noise, or to have prosody (pitch contour) manipulated to be consistent or inconsistent with a specific inferred meaning. Participants repeat the sentences while a camera tracks changes in their eye movements and changes in pupil dilation.

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion Criteria: To be eligible for this study, a participant must: * Be an adult between the age of 18 to 75 years * Have had normal hearing and speech/language development as a young child * For younger NH listeners: have normal audiometric thresholds below 25 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 8000 Hz * for cochlear implant listeners: at least 6 months experience with a cochlear implant * For older (55+ years) age-matched listeners with no cochlear implant: normal audiometric thresholds below 25 dB HL at frequencies between 250 and 2000 Hz and thresholds below 35 dB HL (hearing level) between 4000 and 8000 Hz * For cochlear implant listeners: be able to recognize spoken words in English at a rate of at least 50% * Be a competent speaker of north American English * Lack language-learning or other cognitive disabilities * Lack of auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder Exclusion Criteria: * unable to fix gaze position * eye disease preventing typical changes in pupil dilation * lack of perceptual and productive fluency in English

Conditions

Auditory Perception; Abnormal Hearing Loss, Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Locations

University of Minnesota — Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

Partner with Nurenyx

Showcase your study to thousands of motivated patients matching your criteria.

Learn More

Official Source

Data sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

View Official Record

Accelerate Your Clinical Trial Recruitment