Listening Effort Is Difficult to Detect in a Person's Voice: Implications for Audiology Evaluations and Conversation
Matthew B Winn1, Katherine H Teece1
1Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Purpose:
Listening can be effortful for a variety of reasons, including when a person misperceives a word in a sentence and then mentally repairs it using later context. The current study explored whether an external observer (in the role of a tester/clinician) could detect that effort by hearing the listener's voice as they repeat the sentence.
Method:
Stimuli were audio recordings of 13 adults with cochlear implants repeating sentences that were either intact or with a masked word that could be inferred/repaired using context (the latter of which were previously documented to elicit greater effort). Participants (n = 171, including 28 audiologists) used a continuous visual analog scale to judge whether the talker heard one type of stimulus or the other. Participants were also surveyed for experiences related to detecting effort or confusion in a talker's voice.
Results:
Participant judges were unable to discern when the CI users were forced to effortfully infer words from context when repeating a sentence. Ratings indicated a general bias toward assuming the listener heard the original sentence correctly without any need for repair. Acoustic properties of the CI users' voices (hypothesized higher voice pitch and delayed verbal reaction time for stimuli involving repair) did not reliably correlate with ratings of uncertainty. There were also no statistically detectable advantages for audiologists or for people who reported experience or skill in discerning uncertainty in a talker's voice.
Conclusions:
Despite clear evidence that mental repair incurs extra effort, the process of mental repair gives no reliably perceptible signature in a talker's voice, even for audiologists and others who profess to have experience and skill in conversing with people who have hearing loss. Listening effort is at risk of going unnoticed by conversation partners and by audiologists who might underestimate a patient's effort when listening to speech.
Supplemental Material:
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28688012.
More Related Videos
09:09Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
11:39Assessment of Audio-Tactile Sensory Substitution Training in Participants with Profound Deafness Using the Event-Related Potential Technique
Published on: September 7, 2022
Related Concept Videos
01:28Physical Assessment of the Respiratory Tract IV: Auscultation
Breath Sounds
Breath sounds are categorized into vesicular, bronchovesicular, and bronchial.
00:53Sound Intensity Level
The human ear can perceive an extensive range of sound intensity, necessitating the use of the logarithmic scale to define a physical quantity—the intensity level. It is a ratio of two intensities and...
01:31Respiratory System Abnormal Finding II: Palpation and Auscultation
Palpation Findings
During a respiratory assessment, palpation can reveal several vital abnormalities:
01:30Barriers to Effective Communication I
Communication barriers include the following:
Physiological barriers: They are limitations caused by a person's health condition or disability, such as hearing loss, poor eyesight, illness, or unconsciousness. An example to overcome this...
01:30Therapeutic Communication
Verbal communication depends on language or a prescribed way of using words so that people can share information effectively. The critical aspects of verbal...
01:06Echo
Imagine the sound is reflected back to the ears. Assuming that the source is very close to the human, the difference between hearing the two sounds—the emitted sound and the reflected sound—may be more than the minimum time for perceiving distinct sounds. If this is the case,...