Empirical evidence supporting effortful listening
HEARING LOSS
Substantial evidence exists in support of effortful listening theories, including studies that compare older adults with normal hearing versus older adults with hearing loss, as well as those that manipulate the level of cognitive demand or listening effort. For example, in studies where the acoustic challenge is increased (e.g., degraded speech, speech-in-noise tasks), normal-hearing individuals exhibit greater difficulty processing linguistically complex sentences, poorer speech comprehension, and reduced memory for auditory information [