Abstract
It is well-established that communication involves the working memory system, which becomes increasingly engaged in understanding speech as the input signal degrades. The more resources allocated to recovering a degraded input signal, the fewer resources, referred to as cognitive spare capacity (CSC), remain for higher-level processing of speech. Using simulated natural listening environments, the aims of this paper were to (1) evaluate an English version of a recently introduced auditory test to measure CSC that targets the updating process of the executive function, (2) investigate if the test predicts speech comprehension better than the reading span test (RST) commonly used to measure working memory capacity, and (3) determine if the test is sensitive to increasing the number of attended locations during listening. In Experiment I, the CSC test was presented using a male and a female talker, in quiet and in spatially separated babble- and cafeteria-noises, in an audio-only and in an audio-visual mode. Data collected on 21 listeners with normal and impaired hearing confirmed that the English version of the CSC test is sensitive to population group, noise condition, and clarity of speech, but not presentation modality. In Experiment II, performance by 27 normal-hearing listeners on a novel speech comprehension test presented in noise was significantly associated with working memory capacity, but not with CSC. Moreover, this group showed no significant difference in CSC as the number of talker locations in the test increased. There was no consistent association between the CSC test and the RST. It is recommended that future studies investigate the psychometric properties of the CSC test, and examine its sensitivity to the complexity of the listening environment in participants with both normal and impaired hearing.
Highlights
Participation in social activities has been found to be important for a person’s psychological and general well-being (Pinquart and Sörensen, 2000), and verbal communication is often the key to social interactions
In the second experiment we investigated if this measure of cognitive spare capacity (CSC) or a measure of working memory capacity, using the reading span test (RST), better predicted variation in speech comprehension, and if CSC was reduced when increasing the number of talkers in the listening situation
We note that with an administration of two lists per test condition, 74% of variance in CSC scores obtained in Experiment I was due to intra-participant measurement error variance, which would have reduced the reported regression coefficients
Summary
Participation in social activities has been found to be important for a person’s psychological and general well-being (Pinquart and Sörensen, 2000), and verbal communication is often the key to social interactions. Effective communication requires an interaction between implicit bottom–up and explicit top–down processes, and relies on both healthy auditory and cognitive systems (Wingfield et al, 2005; Pichora-Fuller and Singh, 2006; Schneider et al, 2010). Higher-level processing of speech, such as comprehension, inference making, gist formulation, and response preparation, involves in particular working memory processing (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980; Schneider et al, 2007; Wingfield and Tun, 2007). Working memory is defined as a limited capacity system with storage and processing capabilities that enables the individual to temporarily hold and manipulate information in active use as is necessary for comprehending speech (Baddeley, 1992; Just and Carpenter, 1992). When related to speech comprehension, these three processes refer to the ability to ignore irrelevant information, select the conversation to follow, and process the most recent sounds in order to compare items with stored knowledge to infer meaning, respectively
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