Extrinsic Cognitive Load Impairs Spoken Word Recognition in High- and Low-Predictability Sentences.
Cynthia R Hunter, David B Pisoni
PMID 28945658WHAT IT FOUND
Remembering seven digits before listening made normal-hearing young adults less accurate at identifying final words in vocoded sentences.
The effect shifted with degradation: severe degradation hurt words in predictable sentences, mild degradation hurt words in unpredictable sentences.
Key findings
01Remembering seven digits before listening reduced sentence-final word accuracy compared with remembering three digits.
02The load effect changed with degradation: under severe degradation it impaired high-predictability sentences, and under mild degradation it impaired low-predictability sentences.
03More degraded sentences reduced recall of long digit sequences, and less predictable sentences reduced recall of short digit sequences when digits were reported after the word.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
All participants were young adults with normal hearing and no history of a hearing or speech disorder, so the results do not show what happens in patients with hearing loss or speech disorders. The speech was artificially noise-vocoded, not natural speech in everyday listening conditions. The degradation level was fixed for each participant group, so differences between groups could reflect listening strategies developed during exposure rather than degradation alone. The target word was always the sentence-final word, which may encourage more strategic use of context than everyday listening. The paper does not report how participants were assigned to groups or how many were excluded or dropped out. The study measured accuracy for identifying sentence-final words and recalling digits, not a clinical communication outcome.
Declared interests
The article is tagged as supported by NIH extramural research. The supplied text does not include a conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reducing cognitive load will improve speech recognition in patients. The study tested normal-hearing young adults on vocoded sentences, and the load effect depended on degradation level and sentence predictability.