Testing listening effort for speech comprehension
Resumé
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.Referencer
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