Testing listening effort for speech comprehension

Forfattere

  • Niklas Rönnberg Technical Audiology, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Linköping University, Sweden. Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Sweden.
  • Stefan Stenfelt Technical Audiology, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Linköping University, Sweden. Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Sweden.
  • Mary Rudner Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden. Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Sweden.
  • Thomas Lunner Technical Audiology, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Linköping University, Sweden. Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Sweden. Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Sweden. Oticon Research Centre Eriksholm, Snekkersten, Denmark.

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.

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Publiceret

2011-12-15

Citation/Eksport

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. Hentet fra https://proceedings.isaar.eu/index.php/isaarproc/article/view/2011-08

Nummer

Sektion

2011/1. Indicators of hearing impairment and measures of speech perception