Physiological orienting response, noise sensitivity, and annoyance from irrelevant background sound

Love, Jordan; Sollmann, Lea; Niehl, Annika; Francis, Alexander L.

doi:10.1121/2.0000981

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Decreasing intelligibility by adding noise could lead to a qualitatively different experience than listening to speech whose intelligibility is equated by bandwidth reduction, reverberation, spectral distortion, accentedness, or increased speaking rate. For example, if the experimenter must impose a very poor signal-to-noise ratio to reduce digit-recognition performance down to 50%, there will be changes in effort ( Mackersie & Cones, 2011 ) but that effort might reflect the nuisance of noise and source segregation ( Love et al., 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, speech stimuli designed to avoid the linguistic variety of natural speech (e.g., monosyllabic words, digits) or to avoid the unconstrained variety of open-ended responses (e.g., the Coordinate Response Measure by Bolia et al, 2000, and Oldenburg matrix sentence test by Wagener et al, 1999) are not simplifying the search for listening effort-they are likely addressing different questions unrelated to the effort of language processing. Such tests can be useful as probes of the auditory system since they show reliable reductions in performance with background noise and can elicit effort of signal detection and digit recognition (Mackersie & Cones, 2011), as well as recognizing the affective response to noise (Francis et al, 2016;Love et al, 2019). However, closed-set responses by definition exclude the recognition of the types of errors that elicit meaningfully different amounts of effort.…”

Section: The Implications Of This Study For Speech Perception Testing...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Winn

Teece

2021

Trends in Hearing

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Listening effort is a valuable and important notion to measure because it is among the primary complaints of people with hearing loss. It is tempting and intuitive to accept speech intelligibility scores as a proxy for listening effort, but this link is likely oversimplified and lacks actionable explanatory power. This study was conducted to explain the mechanisms of listening effort that are not captured by intelligibility scores, using sentence-repetition tasks where specific kinds of mistakes were prospectively planned or analyzed retrospectively. Effort measured as changes in pupil size among 20 listeners with normal hearing and 19 listeners with cochlear implants. Experiment 1 demonstrates that mental correction of misperceived words increases effort even when responses are correct. Experiment 2 shows that for incorrect responses, listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. A simple taxonomy of error types is provided that is both intuitive and consistent with data from these two experiments. The diversity of errors in these experiments implies that speech perception tasks can be designed prospectively to elicit the mistakes that are more closely linked with effort. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Implications Of This Study For Speech Perception Testing...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Winn

Teece

2021

Trends in Hearing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, if the experimenter must impose a very poor signal-to-noise ratio in order to reduce digit-recognition performance down to 50%, there will be changes in effort (Mackersie & Cones 2011), but that effort might reflect the nuisance of noise and source segregation, whereas open-set speech stimuli would demand effort of linguistic processing and disambiguation; there is no reason to believe that these types of effort are equal, and in fact some reason to think that they are different (Francis et al 2016). Affective responses like frustration and annoyance also contribute to physiological measurements (Francis & Oliver 2018), suggesting that the outcome measure used in the current study -pupil-indexed autonomic nervous activity -should not be considered a pure reflection of listening and language comprehension, but also a reflection of the listener's personal experience and comfort with uncertainty during a task (Francis & Love 2019).…”

Section: The Evolving View Of Listening Effortmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Personality traits and noise tolerance have been shown by Love et al (2019) to influence common physiological measures of listening effort. These interacting factors are yet to be fully described in the literature, and could possibly interact with age, as well as listener fatigue (McGarrigle et al 2017).…”

Section: The Evolving View Of Listening Effortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening effort is not the same as speech intelligibility score

Winn¹,

Teece²

2020

Preprint

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Speech perception and listening effort are complicated and interrelated concepts. One might assume that intelligibility performance (percent correct) is a proxy for listening effort, but there are some reasons to challenge whether that is actually true. Correct responses in speech perception tests could reflect effortful mental processing, and a completely wrong answer could evoke very little effort, especially if the misperception itself is linguistically well-formed and sensible. This paper presents evidence that listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct, but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. We offer a taxonomy of error types that is both intuitive and also consistent with data from two experiments measuring listening effort with careful controls to either elicit specific kinds of mistakes or to track specific mistakes retrospectively. Participants included individuals with normal hearing or with cochlear implants. In two experiments of sentence repetition, listening effort – indexed by changes in pupil size – was found to scale with the amount of perceptual restoration needed (phoneme versus whole word), and also scale with the sensibility of responses, but not with the number of intelligibility errors. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them in order to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.

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