Subjective listening effort and electrodermal activity in listening situations with reverberation and noise

Authors

  • Inga Holube Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Oldenburg, Germany
  • Kristina Haeder Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Oldenburg, Germany
  • Christina Imbery Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Oldenburg, Germany
  • Ralf Heindorf Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Oldenburg, Germany
  • Reinhard Weber Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

Abstract

Disturbing factors like reverberation or ambient noise can obstruct speech recognition and raise the listening effort needed for communication in daily life. Situations with high listening effort are considered to incur an increased stress for the listener. The aim of this study was to assess listening effort in situations with background noise and reverberation. For this purpose, a subjective scaling of the listening effort, together with the electrodermal activity (EDA) as a measure of the autonomic stress reaction, was used. Ten young normal-hearing (NH) and 17 elderly hearing-impaired (HI) participants listened to sentences from the Oldenburg sentence test in stationary background noise and reverberation. Four listening situations were generated, an easy and a hard one for each of the two disturbing factors, which were related to each other by the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The results of the subjective scaling showed significant differences between the easy and the hard listening situations in both subject groups. However, various analyses of the EDA values indicate differences between the results of the groups. For the NH listeners, similar tendencies were observed both in the subjective results and the physiological EDA data. For the HI listeners, these effects in the EDA data were less pronounced.

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Published

2015-12-15

How to Cite

Holube, I., Haeder, K., Imbery, C., Heindorf, R., & Weber, R. (2015). Subjective listening effort and electrodermal activity in listening situations with reverberation and noise. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research, 5, 381–388. Retrieved from https://proceedings.isaar.eu/index.php/isaarproc/article/view/2015-45

Issue

Vol. 5 (2015): Individual Hearing Loss - Characterization, modelling, compensation strategies

Section

2015/6. Speech intelligibility in noise: Evaluation and modelling

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