Validation of a simple response-time measure of listening effort

Pals, Carina; Sarampalis, Anastasios; Rijn, Hedderik van; Başkent, Deniz

doi:10.1121/1.4929614

Cited by 57 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This finding was consistent with the detrimental effect of noise on effort-related measures reported in previous studies (e.g., Downs & Crum 1978;Picou et al 2013;Pals et al 2015). Howard et al (2010) also echoed our result by demonstrating that a more challenging SNR was correlated with poorer digit recall performance in school-age children when compared to a more favourable SNR.…”

Section: Changes In Listening Effortsupporting

confidence: 82%

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Hsu

Vanpoucke²,

Wieringen

2017

Ear &Amp; Hearing

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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.

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Section: Changes In Listening Effortsupporting

confidence: 82%

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Hsu

Vanpoucke²,

Wieringen

2017

Ear &Amp; Hearing

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“…Their results showed that perceived effort consistently decreased from the highest to lowest SU-level. Similarly, Pals et al (2015) found longer RTprim in the most difficult conditions and shortest RTprim in the "No noise" condition.…”

Section: Different Measures Reflect Different Aspects Of Listening Efmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Since self-reported effort and RTprim behave similarly in the present study, we could assume that they reflect the same aspect of listening effort. However, self-reported measures are often considered to measure perceived effort whereas single-task paradigm reaction times (RTprim) are assumed to reflect the cognitive processing time required to understand speech (Pals et al, 2015). A possible explanation could be that these measures behave similarly because in our study self-report and RTprim did not measure the motivation of the participant.…”

Section: Perceived Effort Versus Processing Loadmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Since studies have shown that reaction times during single speech-in-noise tasks can be used as a behavioral correlate of listening effort (Gatehouse & Gordon, 1990;Pals et al, 2015), we asked the participants to push the middle button when recalling the matrix sentence (second screen). The reaction time (RTprim) was calculated between the end of the auditory presentation of the sentence and the recall of the participant (i.e.…”

Section: Dual-task Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To measure listening effort during a behavioral experiment, a single-task or a dual-task paradigm can be used. Single-task paradigms usually involve a speech-in-noise test in which the reaction time to the recalling of heard sentences, is registered (Gatehouse & Gordon, 1990;Houben et al, 2013;Pals et al, 2015). A dual-task paradigm consists of two tasks and is based on the assumption that a person has a limited amount of cognitive resources that can be allocated to the two tasks (Kahneman, 1973).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Top-down modulation of neural envelope tracking: the interplay with behavioral, self-report and neural measures of listening effort

Decruy

Lesenfants

Vanthornhout

et al. 2019

Preprint

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AbstractWhen listening to natural speech, our neural activity tracks the speech envelope. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that this neural envelope tracking can be affected by top-down processes. The present study was designed to examine if neural envelope tracking is modulated by the effort that a person expends during listening. Five measures were included to quantify listening effort: two behavioral measures based on a novel dual-task paradigm, a self-report effort measure and two neural measures related to neural phase synchronization and alpha power. Electroencephalography responses to sentences, presented at a wide range of subject-specific signal-to-noise ratios, were recorded in thirteen young, normal-hearing adults. A comparison of the five measures revealed different effects of listening effort as a function of speech understanding. Reaction times on the primary task and self-reported effort decreased with increasing speech understanding. In contrast, reaction times on the secondary task and alpha power showed a peak-shaped behavior with highest effort at intermediate speech understanding levels. We found a positive association between envelope tracking and speech understanding. While a significant effect of listening effort was found on theta-band envelope tracking, the effect size was negligible. Therefore, our results suggest that listening effort is not a confound when using envelope tracking to objectively measure speech understanding in young, normal-hearing adults.

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Investigating Sensitivity to Auditory Cognition in Listening Effort Assessments: A Simultaneous EEG and Pupillometry Study

Kılıç,

Sendesen,

Aslan

et al. 2024

Brain and Behavior

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BackgroundIt is still not fully explained what kind of cognitive sources the methods used in the assessment of listening effort are more sensitive to and how these measurement results are related to each other. The aim of the study is to ascertain which neural resources crucial for listening effort are most sensitive to objective measurement methods using differently degraded speech stimuli.MethodsA total of 49 individuals between the ages of 19 and 34 with normal hearing participated in the study. In the first stage, simultaneous pupillometry, electroencephalogram (EEG), and single‐task paradigm reaction time (RT) measurements were made during the challenging listening and repetition task with noise‐vocoded speech. Two speech reception thresholds (SRT) (50% and 80%) for two vocoding conditions (16 and 6 channels) were collected, resulting in 4 conditions. In the second stage, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and the test of attention in listening (TAIL) were applied. Stepwise linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the predictors of listening effort measurements.ResultsA significant difference was found between 6 and 16 channel stimuli in both pupil dilation change and EEG alpha band power change. In the hardest listening condition, whereas RAVLT scores are significant predictors of pupil dilation change, TAIL scores are significant predictors of EEG alpha power. As the stimulus difficulty decreased, the factors that predicted both EEG and pupillometry results decreased. In the single‐task paradigm, a significant regression model could not be obtained at all four difficulty levels.ConclusionAs a result of the study, it was found that the pupil dilation change was more sensitive to auditory memory skills and the EEG alpha power change was more sensitive to auditory attention skills. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the sensitivity of different listening effort measurement methods to auditory cognitive skills.

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Validation of a simple response-time measure of listening effort

Cited by 57 publications

References 18 publications

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Listening Effort Through Depth of Processing in School-Age Children

Top-down modulation of neural envelope tracking: the interplay with behavioral, self-report and neural measures of listening effort

Investigating Sensitivity to Auditory Cognition in Listening Effort Assessments: A Simultaneous EEG and Pupillometry Study

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