The Listener Effect in Multitalker Speech Segregation and Talker Identification.
Robert A Lutfi, Briana Rodriguez, Jungmee Lee
PMID 34693853WHAT IT FOUND
In laboratory tests of separating overlapping speech, the biggest difference was between listeners, not between tasks or cues.
Some normal-hearing students performed near the benchmark, others near chance.
Key findings
01In Experiment 1, the task had little effect once performance was compared with an ideal observer, but listeners differed greatly, from near the ideal observer benchmark to near chance.
02In Experiment 2, four listeners used the location cue considerably better than the frequency cue, and averaging over listeners could disguise this as a general cue effect.
03In Experiment 4, naturally spoken sentences did not remove individual differences: performance ranged from near chance to close to the ideal observer benchmark, with no main effect of the linguistic factor.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The participants were normal-hearing university students, so the study does not show how people who are not normal-hearing students would perform. The tasks were laboratory judgments about synthetic vowels and short sentences, not real conversations or clinical outcomes. Each experiment used a small number of listeners, and not all listeners participated in all experiments. The ideal observer benchmark is a theoretical statistical standard, not a clinical measure. No intervention was tested, so the paper cannot show that any therapy or assessment would help.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the wide range in performance as a clinical test result. It came from normal-hearing students doing synthetic vowel and sentence tasks, not from a clinical population or a clinical outcome measure.