Abstract
Adults with poorer peripheral hearing have slower phonological processing speed measured using visual rhyme tasks, and it has been suggested that this is due to fading of phonological representations stored in long-term memory. Representations of both vowels and consonants are likely to be important for determining whether or not two printed words rhyme. However, it is not known whether the relation between phonological processing speed and hearing loss is specific to the lower frequency ranges which characterize vowels or higher frequency ranges that characterize consonants. We tested the visual rhyme ability of 212 adults with hearing loss. As in previous studies, we found that rhyme judgments were slower and less accurate when there was a mismatch between phonological and orthographic information. A substantial portion of the variance in the speed of making correct rhyme judgment decisions was explained by lexical access speed. Reading span, a measure of working memory, explained further variance in match but not mismatch conditions, but no additional variance was explained by auditory variables. This pattern of findings suggests possible reliance on a lexico-semantic word-matching strategy for solving the rhyme judgment task. Future work should investigate the relation between adoption of a lexico-semantic strategy during phonological processing tasks and hearing aid outcome.
Highlights
Hearing impairment is a highly prevalent neurological condition that is associated with changes in brain organization, i.e., neural plasticity (Jayakody et al, 2018)
Even mild hearing loss leads to neural plasticity (Campbell and Sharma, 2014) and recently we showed hearing-related variation in regional brain volume in a large middle-aged non-clinical cohort (Rudner et al, 2019)
Plasticity associated with hearing loss is found in the auditory pathway, including primary auditory cortex (Peelle et al, 2011; Eckert et al, 2012) and auditory processing regions in the superior temporal gyrus (Husain et al, 2011; Boyen et al, 2013; Yang et al, 2014; Rudner et al, 2019), and in brain regions involved in higher order cognitive processing (Husain et al, 2011; Yang et al, 2014; Rudner et al, 2019), including phonological processing
Summary
Hearing impairment is a highly prevalent neurological condition that is associated with changes in brain organization, i.e., neural plasticity (Jayakody et al, 2018). This applies to pre-lingual hearing impairment and profound deafness (Lomber et al, 2010; Rudner, 2018) and to acquired hearing loss (Ito et al, 1993; Cardin, 2016; Jayakody et al, 2018). Differences in functional hearing even in a non-clinical cohort are associated with differences in the volume of cognitive processing regions, including the hippocampus (Rudner et al, 2019), a subcortical structure that mediates long-term memory encoding and retrieval
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