Listener characteristics differentially affect self-reported and physiological measures of effort associated with two challenging listening conditions

Noah Silbert,Jordan Love,Tessa Bent,Alexander L Francis,Jennifer Schumaker

doi:10.3758/s13414-020-02195-9

Abstract

Listeners vary in their ability to understand speech in adverse conditions. Differences in both cognitive and linguistic capacities play a role, but increasing evidence suggests that such factors may contribute differentially depending on the listening challenge. Here, we used multilevel modeling to evaluate contributions of individual differences in age, hearing thresholds, vocabulary, selective attention, working memory capacity, personality traits, and noise sensitivity to variability in measures of comprehension and listening effort in two listening conditions. A total of 35 participants completed a battery of cognitive and linguistic tests as well as a spoken story comprehension task using (1) native-accented English speech masked by speech-shaped noise and (2) nonnative accented English speech without masking. Masker levels were adjusted individually to ensure each participant would show (close to) equivalent word recognition performance across the two conditions. Dependent measures included comprehension tests results, self-rated effort, and electrodermal, cardiovascular, and facial electromyographic measures associated with listening effort. Results showed varied patterns of responsivity across different dependent measures as well as across listening conditions. In particular, results suggested that working memory capacity may play a greater role in the comprehension of nonnative accented speech than noise-masked speech, while hearing acuity and personality may have a stronger influence on physiological responses affected by demands of understanding speech in noise. Furthermore, electrodermal measures may be more strongly affected by affective response to noise-related interference while cardiovascular responses may be more strongly affected by demands on working memory and lexical access.

Highlights

Listeners vary in their ability to understand speech in adverse conditions
The data points with normalized heart period values close to ±4 are likely outliers, re-running the analysis excluding the three participants whose scores lie outside three standard deviations from the group mean results in substantially similar findings: All of the same factors were significant at p < .05 that had been with those three participants included, and all that were not were not. These results suggest that individual traits, including personality, age, vocabulary, and working memory capacity, may affect how listeners respond physiologically to challenging listening conditions
Performance on the story comprehension questions was comparable across the noise and accented conditions, which suggests that, by broadly matching word recognition performance across the two listening challenges on an individual listener basis, we were successful in matching the overall difficulty of the experimental listening tasks as well

Summary

Introduction

Listeners vary in their ability to understand speech in adverse conditions. Differences in both cognitive and linguistic capacities play a role, but increasing evidence suggests that such factors may contribute differentially depending on the listening challenge. An enhanced ability to use indexical properties (e.g., regional dialect or nonnative accent identification) is correlated with word recognition in noise (Atagi and Bent, 2016; Tamati et al, 2013) These studies highlight the importance of individual differences in linguistic capabilities, especially those related to vocabulary. We refer to studies comparing measures from different conditions as a “task comparison” approach Previous uses of this approach have proposed that measures may differ within participants but across tasks either because different listeners employ different strategies in a given condition (Bent et al, 2016) or because they employ similar cognitive strategies across varying adverse conditions but with differing degrees of success across individuals (Borrie, Baese-Berk, Van Engen, & Bent, 2017). McLaughlin et al (2018) combine these two accounts, arguing that listeners may apply some cognitive resources or strategies more generally (i.e., those involving lexical access) while other resources are engaged in a source-specific or environment-specific manner

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion