Effects of Hearing Impairment on Listening Effort and Speech Intelligibility: A Systematic Review of Literature

INTRODUCTION: Hearing impairment is considered as the most common disorder in the humans as it causes lots of problems in routine life of people suffering from this ailment as it brings issues with speech recognition, communication, and language accretion Hearing impairment causes drastic effect on people’s social life as it creates difficulties in and restricts them from participating in social activities due to increased effort required for listening PURPOSE: The main purpose of this study is to understand the effects of hearing impairment on listening effort and speech intelligibility METHODS: Literatures like Google Scholar, science Direct, PubMed were used and key words like cochlear implants, listening effort, speech intelligibility, and hearing loss, hearing impairment, Bilateral and unilateral hearing loss were used. Multiple retrospective, prospective and cross sectional studies were reviewed and additional methodological filters were used for paper selection and selected papers published from 2000 to 2021 were assessed and selected. 11 original articles fulfilled inclusion criteria RESULTS: After series of multiple experiments on different populations listening effort was found to be greater in subjects with hearing impairment, cochlear implant, Unilateral and bilateral hearing implants as compared to normal. Speech intelligibility is lower in subjects with high listening effort. CONCLUSION: Our review concluded that listening effort is inversely related to speech intelligibility. However no accurate technique is available to measure listening effort. DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/93-03 Publication date: September 30 th 2021