Only Behavioral But Not Self-Report Measures of Speech Perception Correlate with Cognitive Abilities.

Antje Heinrich,Helen Henshaw,Melanie A Ferguson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00576

Abstract

Good speech perception and communication skills in everyday life are crucial for participation and well-being, and are therefore an overarching aim of auditory rehabilitation. Both behavioral and self-report measures can be used to assess these skills. However, correlations between behavioral and self-report speech perception measures are often low. One possible explanation is that there is a mismatch between the specific situations used in the assessment of these skills in each method, and a more careful matching across situations might improve consistency of results. The role that cognition plays in specific speech situations may also be important for understanding communication, as speech perception tests vary in their cognitive demands. In this study, the role of executive function, working memory (WM) and attention in behavioral and self-report measures of speech perception was investigated. Thirty existing hearing aid users with mild-to-moderate hearing loss aged between 50 and 74 years completed a behavioral test battery with speech perception tests ranging from phoneme discrimination in modulated noise (easy) to words in multi-talker babble (medium) and keyword perception in a carrier sentence against a distractor voice (difficult). In addition, a self-report measure of aided communication, residual disability from the Glasgow Hearing Aid Benefit Profile, was obtained. Correlations between speech perception tests and self-report measures were higher when specific speech situations across both were matched. Cognition correlated with behavioral speech perception test results but not with self-report. Only the most difficult speech perception test, keyword perception in a carrier sentence with a competing distractor voice, engaged executive functions in addition to WM. In conclusion, any relationship between behavioral and self-report speech perception is not mediated by a shared correlation with cognition.

Highlights

Good communication skills in everyday life are crucial for wellbeing and are overarching aims of audiological rehabilitation
We found no significant correlations between cognitive performance and Phoneme Discrimination (PD) suggesting that none of the cognitive abilities tested here played a role in this speech task
One difference we found between Heinrich et al (2015) and the current study is the fact that single word perception, operationalized as triple digits in the previous study and as Four Alternative Auditory Feature (FAAF) or single words in a dual task in the current study (Words), seemed to engage different cognitive processes

Summary

Introduction

Good communication skills in everyday life are crucial for wellbeing and are overarching aims of audiological rehabilitation. One way of measuring communication abilities is by using speech perception tests. They use Speech Perception, Cognition and Self-Report behavioral indices to assess the passive perception of speech without an opportunity for interaction with other people. In contrast to behavioral speech perception tests, they often explicitly ask about how acoustic and linguistic information is used and transmitted effectively in a bi-directional process. Given this difference, it is likely that these two measures assess only partially complementary aspects of a listener’s experience (see Pronk et al, 2011 for a similar argument)

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Conclusion