Pupil Dilation Is Sensitive to Semantic Ambiguity and Acoustic Degradation.
Mason Kadem, Björn Herrmann, Jennifer M Rodd and 1 others
PMID 33124518WHAT IT FOUND
Pupil size grew in students with normal hearing when sentences had background noise or words with more than one meaning.
This happened even when sentences were clear, and pupil size did not match comprehension scores.
Key findings
01Mean pupil area was larger at 0 dB SNR than at +6 dB SNR, and larger at -2 dB SNR than with clear sentences.
02Pupil area was larger for high-ambiguity sentences than low-ambiguity sentences when the sentences were clear.
03No significant correlations were observed between mean pupil area and performance on the comprehension task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were students who reported normal hearing, so the results do not show how people with hearing loss would perform. Data from one additional participant recorded for Experiment 2 were excluded because of a data storage failure. The study did not test an intervention or a treatment effect. Pupil area did not correlate with comprehension accuracy, so pupil size should not be read as a direct measure of understanding. The two experiments used different maskers and signal levels, so the pupil responses are not directly interchangeable across experiments.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not report a conflict-of-interest or funding declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that pupil dilation is a clinical measure of comprehension. Pupil size increased with noise and ambiguous words, but it did not correlate with comprehension accuracy.