Abstract
Background: Regarding the strong auditory spatial plasticity capability of the central auditory system and the effect of short-term and long-term rehabilitation programs in elderly people, it seems that an auditory spatial training can help this population in informational masking release and better track speech in noisy environments. The main purposes of this study are developing an informational masking measurement test and an auditory spatial training program. Protocol: This study will be conducted in two parts. Part 1: develop and determine the validity of an informational masking measurement test by recruiting two groups of young (n=50) and old (n=50) participants with normal hearing who have no difficulty in understanding speech in noisy environments. Part 2 (clinical trial): two groups of 60-75-year-olds with normal hearing, who complain about difficulty in speech perception in noisy environments, will participate as control and intervention groups to examine the effect of auditory spatial training. Intervention: 8 sessions of auditory spatial training. The informational masking measurement test and Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale will be compared before intervention, immediately after intervention, and one month after intervention between the two groups. Discussion: Since auditory training programs do not deal with informational masking release, an auditory spatial training will be designed, aiming to improve hearing in noisy environments for elderly populations. Trial registration: Iranian Registry of Clinical Trials (IRCT20190118042404N1) on 25th February 2019.
Highlights
Understanding speech in noisy environments is a major challenge of the auditory system, which occurs mostly due to aging
There is no previous study, which was used the same training as this study proposes; we considered the study of Delphi et al which was on a group of elderly individuals[37]
Since informational masking has an important role in competing signal environments and rehabilitation programs have not considered this an important aspect of masking, designing training that can help elderly people in releasing this masking is novel
Summary
Understanding speech in noisy environments is a major challenge of the auditory system, which occurs mostly due to aging. The main hypothesis for the second part of the study is that presenting an auditory spatial training for elderly people would be effective in the improvement of speech recognition in noisy environments by stimulating the centers related to binaural processing Protocol This is version 1 of this protocol. Assessments after auditory spatial training (interview immediately after and one month after training) The informational masking test (as per Part 1) will be done immediately after training and one month after using the Persian list of the coordinate response measure (CRM) corpus, which will be compared with the pre-training results (preliminary interview) This score will be the primary outcome. The informational masking release value will be calculated based on the difference between sentence recognition score (in all 20 conditions of signal to noise, different spatial angles, and two genders) in both noise situations (meaningful and nonunderstandable). 50 young people aged between 20 and 40 years and 50 elderly people aged between 60 and 75 years, with normal hearing who do not suffer from speech understanding in noisy environments, will be recruited
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