Which cognitive ability predicts speech-in-noise intelligibility depends on the listening situation

Evidence

The results suggest that the importance of a particular variable often, but not always, depends on the listening situation. Hearing sensitivity (PTA) and a basic WM task correlated with intelligibility in all tested situations. The results for PTA are somewhat surprising given that all speech testing was done at sensitivity-adjusted levels, which might have been expected to equate for PTA differences. The PTA measure may therefore capture some aspect of hearing that is not well represented by SRT. The importance of WM for intelligibility is less surprising. However, the rather basic, storage-based WM task appeared to capture a more general benefit, at least in the tested listening situations, than the often-used RST. While the RST did predict intelligibility, the effect was stronger for acoustically difficult listening situations (low SNR). The data provide support for the notion that the relationship between RST and speech perception depends on the listening situations and that inconsistent results in the literature may have occurred because not all speech tasks engage WM processes enough to lead to a reliable correlation. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the aging/noise frameworks from other chapters and to the broader literature on working-memory models of speech perception (e.g. Rönnberg’s Ease of Language Understanding).