Energetic and Informational Components of Speech-on-Speech Masking in Binaural Speech Intelligibility and Perceived Listening Effort.
Jan Rennies, Virginia Best, Elin Roverud and 1 others
PMID 31172880WHAT IT FOUND
Adding spatial separation, gender differences, or time-reversed maskers to speech improved both understanding and reduced listening effort.
These benefits persisted even when speech was already perfectly intelligible. However, individual gains in effort did not predict individual gains in understanding.
Key findings
01Combining multiple unmasking cues produced larger improvements in speech intelligibility than any single cue alone.
02Unmasking cues reduced listening effort even in conditions where speech intelligibility was already at ceiling.
03Individual improvements in listening effort were not correlated with individual improvements in speech intelligibility.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used only 10 subjects, all with normal hearing, so findings may not generalize to patients with hearing loss. The task used closed-set matrix sentences (fixed vocabulary), which is easier than open-set conversation. Large individual differences were observed in how subjects benefited from cues, making group averages potentially misleading for clinical prediction. Listening effort was measured via subjective self-report, which can be influenced by response bias.
Declared interests
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a patient who shows no improvement in speech intelligibility scores when a new hearing aid setting is applied has not benefited from it. This study found that listening effort can decrease significantly even when intelligibility is already at ceiling, and that effort benefits do not correlate with intelligibility benefits at the individual level.