Jan 2026· Trends in Hearing· Vol 30· 0 citations· 48 references
Medicine
Abstract
Listening effort reflects the cognitive resources allocated to overcome obstacles in auditory processing. While acoustic degradation (e.g., noise, reverberation) is known to affect listening effort, little is known about how temporal overlap of task processing influences effortful listening in adults. This study examined behavioral and subjective listening effort in 26 adults using a sequential dual-task paradigm manipulating stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 0.05 s, 0.25 s, 1.5 s, single task), noise condition (silence, multi-talker babble at 0 dB SNR), and acoustic environment (anechoic, room effects of T30 = 0.49 s). Task difficulty via decreasing stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) significantly increased word recognition response times and subjective effort ratings, even when speech intelligibility remained high (∼90%) . Noise effects emerged only at longer SOAs, but vanished at very short SOAs where capacity was exhausted, indicating that SOA is a stronger predictor of listening effort than noise exposure. Interestingly, mild reverberation reduced behavioral listening effort compared to anechoic conditions in silence.
Reverberation can degrade speech intelligibility and comprehension, increase cognitive load, and impair memory. Many studies examining reverberation effects use audio-only conditions and stationary background noise. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent findings generalise beyond laboratory setups. In the present stu...
Cosima A. Ermert, K. Loh, Karl Baylan et al.· Trends in Hearing· 0 citations
Degraded speech increases listening effort at the expense of memory encoding, but the flexibility of this resource trade-off under varying motivational conditions remains poorly understood. The present study investigated how encoding intention influences cognitive resource allocation during a speech-in-noise task. Part...
Morgan Robertson, Kaitlin L. Lansford, L. Eijk et al.· Memory & Cognition· 0 citations
The sounds we experience in our everyday communication can vary greatly depending on the environment. Paradoxically, increasing the sound level may lead to worse speech perception, especially in noise. This decline is known as "rollover." It is unclear how rollover is experienced differentially across aging groups, as...
Cheng-Jie G. Huang, Natalie A. Field, Marie-Elise Latorre et al.· Hearing Research· 1 citation
Do real-time visual cues of listening effort and expectations on the listener's perceived age drive speech adaptations? In experiment 1, young adults read sentences to a listener shown via a head-mounted display. Participants were told their voices were heard under noisy conditions but received no auditory feedback....
C. Valzolgher, Elena Gessa, Elena Giovanelli et al.· Royal Society Open Science· 0 citations
Current speech comprehension assessments do not provide a reliable measure of listeners' real-life speech comprehension ability, as they fail to capture the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world communicative scenarios. To better align laboratory assessment with real-world listening demands, we developed a new sp...
Xin-Yu Guo, Rebecca Holt, K. Miles et al.· Trends in Hearing· 0 citations
Difficulty perceiving speech in noise is the primary complaint of patients seeking hearing healthcare, even absent overt losses in audiometric thresholds. Yet current clinical practice largely focuses on sensory function while ignoring the potentially outsized effects of executive function on everyday suprathreshold li...
Sharadhi Bharadwaj, Catherine Dymowski, Erin Batik et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
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