Testing listening effort for speech comprehension
Abstract
When listening in noise, an individual's cognitive capabilities seem to play an important role. The individual's limited working memory capacity will gradually be consumed by processing the auditory information in increasing background noise, leading to less spare capacity. Good fitting of hearing aids can be seen as a way to ease listening effort, and therefore an objective measure of listening effort would be a useful tool when fitting hearing aids. The aim of the present study was to develop a test of cognitive spare capacity to assess if worse signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) would result in greater objectively measured listening effort. In the Auditory Inference Span Test (AIST) sentences were presented in stationary speech-shaped noise, at three SNRs, and then questions generating different memory load levels were asked about the content of the sentences. Listeners with normal hearing showed decreasing accuracy with increasing cognitive load and slower responses at maximum cognitive load. However, no relation between SNR and cognitive spare capacity could be established in this study.References
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Baddeley, A. (2000). "The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?" Trends. Cogn. Sci., 4, pp. 417-423.
Baddeley, A., Logie, R.H., Nimmo-Smith, I., and Brereton, N. (1985). "Components of fluent reading" J. Mem. Lang., 24, pp. 119-131.
Daneman, M. and Carpenter, P.A. (1980). "Individual differences in working memory and reading" J. V. Learn. Verb. Beha., 19, pp. 450-467.
Daneman, M. and Merikle, P.M. (1996). "Working memory and language comprehension: A meta-analyses". Psychon. Bull. Rev., 3, pp. 422-433.
Edwards, B. (2007). "The future of hearing aid technology" Trends. Amplif., 11, pp. 31-46.
Foo, C., Rudner, M., Rö nnberg, J., and Lunner, T. (2007). "Recognition of speech in noise with new hearing instrument compression release settings requires explicit cognitive storage and processing capacity" J. Am. Acad. Audiol., 18, pp. 618-631.
Gatehouse, S., Nayler, G., and Elberling, C. (2003). "Benefits from hearing aids in relation to the interaction between the user and the environment" Int. J. Audiol., 42, pp. 77-85.
Hagerman, B. (1982). "Sentences for testing speech intelligibility in noise" Scand. Audiol., 11, pp. 79-87.
Hagerman, B. and Kinnefors, C. (1995). "Efficient adaptive methods for measuring speech reception threshold in quiet and in noise" Scand. Audiol., 24, pp. 71-77.
Hicks, C.B. and Tharpe, A.M. (2002). "Listening effort and fatigue in school-age children with and without hearing loss" J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res., 45, pp. 573-584.
Larsby, B., Hällgren, M., Lyxell, B., and Arlinger, S. (2005). "Cognitive performance and perceived effort in speech processing tasks: effects of different noise backgrounds in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects" Int. J. Audiol., 44, pp. 131-143.
Lunner, T. (2003). "Cognitive function in relation to hearing aid use" Int. J. Audiol., 42, Suppl 1, pp. 49-58.
Mishra, S., Rudner, M., Lunner, T., and Rönnberg, J. (2010). "Speech understanding and cognitive spare capacity" in Proceedings of ISAAR 2009: Binaural Processing and Spatial Hearing. 2nd International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research. Elsinore, Denmark. Edited by J.M. Buchholz, T. Dau, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, and T. Poulsen. ISBN: 87-990013-2-2. (The Danavox Jubilee Foundation, Copenhagen), pp. 305-313.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N.P., Emerson, M.J., Witzki, A.H., Howerter, A., and Wager, T.D. (2000). "The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex "Frontal Lobe" tasks: a latent variable analysis" Cogn. Psychol., 41, pp. 49-100.
Pichora-Fuller, M.K. (2007). "Audition and cognition: What audiologists need to know about listening". In: Palmer, C, Seewald, R (Eds), Proceedings of the Adult Conference Phonak, pp. 77-85.
Pichora-Fuller, M.K. and Singh, G. (2006). "Effects of age on auditory and cognitive processing: Implications for hearing aid fitting and audiologic rehabilitation" Trends. Amplif., 10, pp. 29-59.
Rönnberg, J., Arlinger, S., Lyxell, B., and Kinnefors, C. (1989). "Visual evoked potentials: Relation to adult speechreading and cognitive function" J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res., 32, pp. 725-735.
Rönnberg, N., Stenfelt, S., and Rudner, M. (2011). "Testing listening effort for speech comprehension using the individuals’ cognitive spare capacity" Audiology Research, 1(1), e22. doi:10.4081/audiores.2011.e22.
Rudner, M., Foo, C., Rönnberg, J., and Lunner, T. (2009). "Cognition and aided speech recognition in noise: Specific role for cognitive factors following nineweek experience with adjusted compression settings in hearing aids" Scand. J. Psychol., 50, pp. 405-418.
Rudner, M., Rönnberg, J., and Lunner, T. (2011). "Working memory supports listening in noise for persons with hearing impairment" J. Am. Acad. Audiol., 22, pp. 156-167.
Sarampalis, A., Kalluri, S., Edwards, B., and Haftner, E. (2009). "Objective measures of listening effort: Effects of background noise and noise reduction" J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res., 52, pp. 1230-1240.
Schneider, B.A. (2011). "How age affects auditory-cognitive interactions in speech comprehension" Audiology Research, 1(1), e10. doi:10.4081/audiores.2011.e10.
Stenfelt, S. and Rönnberg, J. (2009). "The Signal-Cognition interface: Interactions between degraded auditory signals and cognitive processes" Scand. J. Psychol., 50, pp. 385-393.
Tun, P.A., McCoy, S., and Wingfield, A. (2009). "Aging, hearing acuity, and the attentional costs of effortful listening" Psychol. Aging, 24, pp. 761-766.
Zekveld, A.A., Kramer, S.E., and Festen, J.M. (2010). "Pupil response as an indication of effortful listening - the influence of sentence intelligibility" Ear Hear., 31, pp. 480-490.
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Published
2011-12-15
How to Cite
Rönnberg, N., Stenfelt, S., Rudner, M., & Lunner, T. (2011). Testing listening effort for speech comprehension. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research, 3, 73–80. Retrieved from https://proceedings.isaar.eu/index.php/isaarproc/article/view/2011-08
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2011/1. Indicators of hearing impairment and measures of speech perception
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