Effects of intelligibility on working memory demand for speech perception

Auditory working memory predicts individual differences in absolute pitch learning

“…Learning absolute pitch categories does not clearly fit within the specific taxonomy of rule-based category learning given that there are no clear rules to identify pitches that can be verbally explicit and useful. Since the development of absolute pitch categories does not seem to be an explicit, rule-based model of category learning, it is possible that the learning of absolute pitch categories is not affected by an individual's general auditory WMC, although it does share some characteristics with the problem of perceptual learning of phonetic categories (e.g., Nusbaum & Schwab, 1986;Schwab, Nusbaum, & Pisoni, 1985) and previous work demonstrating that perceptual learning of synthetic speech interacts with WMC (Francis & Nusbaum, 2009).…”

Effects of cognitive load on speech recognition

“…In the attention literature, CL involving divided attention has been shown to be particularly deleterious to the processing of stimuli that require active control, e.g., ignoring voice characteristics (Nusbaum & Schwab, 1986), or stimuli whose acoustic quality leads to more than one interpretation, e.g., a stimulus in between sunny and funny (Cowan, 1997;Francis & Nusbaum, 2009;Nusbaum & Magnuson, 1997;Nusbaum & Pisoni, 1985). In contrast, processes involving automatic memory retrieval are less resourcedemanding (e.g., Jacoby, 1991;Logan, 1988).…”

Working Memory Affects Older Adults’ Use of Context in Spoken-Word Recognition

“…In addition to hearing ability, cognitive abilities could explain individual differences, especially in more difficult listening conditions. The less intelligible the speech becomes in adverse listening conditions, the greater the need for cognitive resources to filter out irrelevant information and to fill in any missing information by using context information to comprehend the speech content (Francis & Nusbaum, 2009). This is in line with the ease of language understanding (ELU) model by Rönnberg and colleagues (Rönnberg, 2003;Rönnberg, Rudner, Foo, & Lunner, 2008) that assumes that cognitive processes become more important when listening conditions are more challenging, due to hearing loss, background noise, or both.…”