Is Recognition of Speech in Noise Related to Memory Disruption Caused by Irrelevant Sound?
Daniel Oberfeld, Katharina Staab, Florian Kattner and 1 others
PMID 39051688WHAT IT FOUND
In 67 normal-hearing young listeners, speech-in-noise scores showed no clear link to how much irrelevant speech disrupted memory.
Better digit recall in quiet and lower self-rated noise sensitivity were associated with better speech recognition.
Key findings
01The irrelevant-speech effect did not significantly predict speech-in-speech recognition scores for either auditory or visual digit lists.
02Short-term memory performance in quiet was the strongest predictor of speech-in-speech recognition in the full regression model.
03Self-reported noise sensitivity correlated negatively with speech recognition and was included in most best predictive models.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was young, mostly psychology students, and all had normal audiometric thresholds, so the results may not apply to older adults, people with hearing loss, or clinical populations. The study measured associations at one time point, so it cannot show whether memory, noise sensitivity, or temporal fine structure sensitivity causes speech-in-noise difficulty. Six of 67 participants were excluded from the regression analysis because they were influential outliers, so the regression used 61 participants. The irrelevant-speech effect had low reliability, especially for visual digit lists, which can weaken observed associations. The visual irrelevant-speech task was always presented in the first session and the auditory task in the second, so practice effects may have affected differences between the two versions. The speech-in-noise task used German sentences in a simulated laboratory setting, not everyday conversations or a clinical assessment.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest and received no financial support for the research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a person's difficulty with irrelevant speech in a memory task explains their trouble hearing in noise. The irrelevant-speech effect was not significantly associated with speech-in-noise recognition. Also, do not treat the associations with short-term memory or noise sensitivity as evidence that training them will help; this was an observational lab study, not a tested intervention.