Advance Contextual Clues Alleviate Listening Effort During Sentence Repair in Listeners With Hearing Aids

When words are misperceived, listeners can rely on later context to repair an auditory perception, at the cost of increased effort. The current study examines whether the effort to repair a missing word in a sentence is alleviated when the listener has some advance knowledge of what to expect in the sentence.

Sixteen adults with hearing aids and 17 with typical hearing heard sentences with a missing word that was followed by context sufficient to infer what the word was. They repeated the sentences with the missing words repaired. Sentences were preceded by visual text on the screen showing either "XXXX" (unprimed) or a priming word previewing the word that would be masked in the auditory signal. Along with intelligibility measures, pupillometry was used as an index of listening effort over the course of each trial to measure how priming influenced the effort needed to mentally repair a missing word.

When listeners were primed for the word that would need to be repaired in an upcoming sentence, listening effort was reduced, as indicated by pupil size returning more quickly toward baseline after the sentence was heard. Priming reduced the lingering cost of mental repair in both listener groups. For the group with hearing loss, priming also reduced the prevalence of errors on target words and words other than the target word in the sentence, suggesting that priming preserves the cognitive resources needed to process the whole sentence.

These results suggest that listeners with typical hearing and with hearing loss can benefit from priming (advance cueing) during speech recognition, to accurately repair speech and to process the speech less effortfully.