Abstract
The present study examined the listening experience of cochlear implant users through simulation by presenting noise-vocoded speech to normal hearing (NH) listeners. The impact of auditory spectral resolution and syntactic complexity on listening effort was investigated in young and older adults. Forty-eight normal-hearing participants (24 young adults, 24 older adults) listened to object-relative (OR) and subject relative (SR) sentences at varying spectral resolutions including noise-vocoded (8, 12, 16, and 20 spectral channels) and natural speech. Pupil dilation was measured during listening as an indicator of effort. Simple comprehension questions were used to measure comprehension. Significant main effects of age group, spectral resolution, and syntactic complexity on comprehension accuracy were observed. Comprehension accuracy was improved at higher spectral resolution, at lower syntactic complexity, and among young relative to older adults. Older adults exhibited larger peak pupil dilation relative to younger adults, supporting the hypothesis that older adults CI users may be differentially susceptible to elevated listening effort.