Ricerc@Sapienza

Unilateral hearing loss (UHL) ¿profound deafness in one ear and normal hearing in the contralateral ear- represents a hot topic in auditory cognitive neuroscience. After years of underinvestigation, due to next to normal behavioural performances, the UHL population has been suggested to present audiological, cognitive functions and cortical activity differences in comparison to normal hearing (NH) persons, especially during demanding conditions. For hearing impaired persons a main challenge is the detection and processing of auditory information with background noise, and this led to focus on the field of listening effort, mostly studied by questionnaires and scales; and by now a few studies were performed on UHL population. In addition, since the effort experienced by hearing impaired people during the speech production, also the related talking effort appears extremely worthy to be investigated through neurophysiology, that is by a totally novel approach. Moreover, since the implications of listening and talking on learning and communication their investigation in children appears crucial. The LI&TA project aims at assessing through neurophysiological measures the listening and talking effort elicited in UHL children during two phases of a typical school task: 1) listening to a story (listening effort phase); 2) during the following solicited verbal production concerning the story (talking effort phase). Furthermore, the task will be performed under signal to noise ratio typical of a real classroom environment. Through the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system (a wearable audio recorder with an automated vocal analysis software) it will be possible to synchronize the listened and spoken material with neurophysiological data. Moreover, through the employment of the eyetracking will be also investigated the possible different reliance on the auditory or visual domain in the UHL children in comparison to NH controls, when facing challenging auditory conditions.