Delayed disambiguation under degradation accumulates working-memory load across running speech.

Evidence

These results were also mirrored by the pupil dilation data, in which a release from lexical competition was visible but delayed. Mapping of degraded speech to mental representations is more effortful due the mismatch between the actual signal and its mental representation, and lexical context is not able to release listeners from this effort on time. In natural situations, in which words are being heard in succession, and the speech signal evolves quickly over time, such a difference in processing speed of degraded speech will accumulate effort, and draw more strongly on resources in working memory. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3953

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that per-word processing delays ‘accumulate’ across connected speech is presented as extrapolation, not directly measured here — an empirical gap worth probing in real-world CI listening.