Measuring listening effort

Abstract

Hearing and listening are not the same thing. While we can hear without listening (background music, inane chatter), we need to be able to hear in order to listen. When it comes to listening to speech, most daily interactions occur within acoustic conditions that allow for full speech intelligibility but which require varying degrees of mental effort. This effort depends on environmental conditions, such as background noise or reverberation, or personal factors, such as cognitive ability or intrinsic motivation. People with hearing loss are often challenged by every day situations. Even if they do understand everything, they are more likely to feel exhausted and quit the situation sooner than those without hearing loss. Thus, traditional speech-in-noise tests are not suitable for measuring listening effort. Research on listening effort has drawn increasing interest in recent years. Studies charting the factors underlying listening effort, developing models of listening effort, and establishing valid and reliable measurement techniques for quantify > quantifying listening effort are emerging. Thus far, the focus has been on listening effort related to speech recognition, aiming to better understand the needs of hearing impaired people and support the development of signal processing algorithms in hearing aids to successfully decrease listening effort. This chapter gives an overview of the current models of listening effort related to speech recognition as well as the subjective, behavioral and physiological methods that attempt to quantify listening effort.