Working-memory and temporal-processing contributions to intelligibility depend on listening conditions.

Evidence

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. Lastly, we showed an effect of individual differences in temporal processing on intelligibility, but this effect was limited to easily perceptible (high SNR) single words. Possibly, temporal information is most useful when the stimulus is clearly audible and no other semantic information is available. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1280

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would temporal processing help only at high SNR where the stimulus is clearly audible and no semantic context exists? Worth chasing the mechanism.
• DEFINE: RST is referenced as an abbreviation without being spelled out, worth noting as the reading-span task.