Abstract
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine structure. Working memory span, age, and audiometric thresholds showed no significant association with speech understanding. These results suggest that a reduced ability to focus attention on a target is one reason why some listeners with normal hearing sensitivity have difficulty communicating in situations with background noise.
Highlights
Imagine yourself sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant, chatting with a friend of yours
Can you follow the conversation with your friend or does the high noise level in general or the conversations heard from other tables interfere with speech intelligibility? While the human auditory system has impressive abilities in structuring the mixture of sound waves arriving at the ears into different auditory objects or streams, listeners show considerable variation when it comes to speech understanding in adverse acoustic conditions, such as the almost proverbial ’cocktail-party’ situation described above (Bronkhorst, 2000; Cherry, 1953)
To which extent did speech understanding in a cocktail-party situation depend on the capability of directing selective attention to a target in the presence of distractors, binaural sensitivity for the temporal fine structure (TFS), and other factors? To answer this question, a multiple linear regression analysis was conducted
Summary
Imagine yourself sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant, chatting with a friend of yours. Can you follow the conversation with your friend or does the high noise level in general or the conversations heard from other tables interfere with speech intelligibility? The percentage of correct responses in reporting a sequence of digits produced by the target speaker varied between 40% and 85% in an anechoic condition. Compatible with these experimental results, in clinical settings a relevant number of patients with normal audiometric findings complain about hearing difficulties in daily life (Zhao and Stephens, 2007)
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