Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Abstract

Objectives: A reliable measure of listening effort is crucial for helping children with communication disorders. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioural paradigm designed to measure listening effort in school-age children and present the results of its validation in a group of normal-hearing children. The paradigm consists of a classic word recognition task in quiet and noise coupled to one of three categorization tasks requiring the children to judge either the color of two pictures or the meaning of the presented words. The response time from the categorization tasks is considered the primary indicator of listening effort. Design:The listening effort paradigm was evaluated in a group of 31 normal-hearing children 7 to 12 years of age without any history of language or developmental disorders. Custom software was developed to allow administration of the entire paradigm from a conventional laptop computer. A separate touch screen was used as a response interface to gather response time (RT) data from the children. All verbal responses were judged from an experienced tester in order to produce a word recognition score (WRS) for each condition. The software presented randomized lists of 146 selected Dutch nouns in one of three signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) to examine the potential effect of noise on both WRS and RT. Three distinct categorization tasks were also developed to examine how different depths of semantic processing would affect the two outcome measures of WRS and RT. It was hypothesized that, while listening effort as measured by RT would be affected by both noise level and the depth of semantic processing, WRS performance would be affected by changes in noise level only.Results: There was a significant effect of SNR level on school-age children's WRS: their word recognition performance tended to decrease with increasing background noise level. However, depth of processing did not appear to affect WRS. Moreover, a repeated-measure analysis of variance (rANOVA) fitted to transformed RT data revealed that this measure of listening effort in normal-hearing school-age children was significantly affected by both SNR level and the depth of semantic processing. There was no significant interaction between noise level and the type of categorization task with regard to RT. Conclusion:The patterns of WRS and RT as observed in our data sets provided support for our general hypothesis regarding the effects of background noise and semantic processing level on speech understanding and listening effort. Even though the magnitude of change in listening effort did not differ between the three novel categorization tasks, the exploratory nature of the current study warranted further evaluation of processing depths as a potential listening effort assessment paradigm in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired populations.

Visual speech cues speed processing and reduce effort for children listening in quiet and noise

“…However, we expected that AV benefits in noise would be greater than those in quiet, due to the increased difficulty of speech processing in noise, meaning that children would have more to gain from the visual cues in this condition. We also expected that processing would be slower and more effortful overall in noise than in quiet, regardless of modality, in agreement with previous findings from both adults and children (e.g., Hsu, Vanpoucke, & van Wieringen, 2017;McGarrigle, Gustafson, Hornsby, & Bess, 2019;Winn, Edwards, & Litovsky, 2015;Zekveld, Heslenfeld, Johnsrude, Versfeld, & Kramer, 2014; though see Hicks & Tharpe, 2002;McGarrigle, Dawes, Stewart, Kuchinsky, & Munro, 2017). Fourth, we hypothesized that one or more of the following four participant characteristics might predict the magnitude of AV benefits for processing speed and/or effort: age, gender, working memory capacity, and how difficult the task was for the participant (as indexed by phoneme isolation ability).…”

“…Regarding pupillary responses, we must highlight that these results for peak dilation come from the analysis of the pupil data that used a per-participant baseline period, rather than a per-trial baseline. Like Wagner et al 2016, we found that using a per-trial baseline period gave counterintuitive results for peak dilation: dilation, and thus apparent processing effort, was greater in quiet than in noise, in contrast with both common sense and previous findings (Hsu et al, 2017;McGarrigle et al, 2019;Winn et al, 2015;Zekveld et al, 2014). As outlined above, we can attribute this to participants' pupils failing to return to original levels of dilation between trials in the noise condition, resulting in artificially reduced peak dilation values.…”

“…We found no effect of quiet versus noisy listening conditions on either speed or effort (nor any interaction between Listening condition and Modality). This was unexpected, as we had anticipated slower responses and increased processing effort in noise overall, given previous results from both adults and children (Hsu et al, 2017;McGarrigle et al, 2019;Winn et al, 2015;Zekveld et al, 2014). Potentially, the SNR in our noise condition (-2 dB; chosen to minimize phoneme monitoring errors and thus data loss) may have been too favorable to slow processing or increase effort.…”

“…Wagner et al (2016) found that when a per-trial baseline was used for pupil dilation analysis, greater pupil dilation was elicited in natural than degraded speech, implying that lexical access was more effortful in the supposedly "easier" listening condition. When a per-participant baseline period was used, this effect was reversed: pupil dilation (and thus effort) was greater when speech was degraded, as would be expected given the existing literature (Hsu et al, 2017;McGarrigle et al, 2019;Winn et al, 2015;Zekveld et al, 2014). This difference in results can be attributed to the sustained effort associated with completing the task with degraded speech.…”

Moderate Reverberation Does Not Increase Subjective Fatigue, Subjective Listening Effort, or Behavioral Listening Effort in School-Aged Children

“…In school-aged children, the results of studies into the effects of background noise on listening effort are less consistent. Using behavioral reaction-time tasks, some investigators have reported that SNR improvements (i.e., decreasing background noise levels) reduces listening effort (Prodi et al, 2010; Gustafson et al, 2014; Lewis et al, 2016; Hsu et al, 2017; McGarrigle et al, 2019); however, the finding is not universal (Hicks and Tharpe, 2002; Howard et al, 2010; McGarrigle et al, 2017, 2019). Some of the discrepancy between the published findings and ELU and FUEL predictions might be related to the sensitivity of the various listening effort paradigms.…”