Working memory storage helps intelligibility while inhibition and vocabulary do not

Evidence

The main effect of PTA reflected the fact that average audiometric threshold was negatively correlated with intelligibility in all listening situations. The interaction with SNR occurred because the correlations tended to be greater for low SNRs than high SNRs. This was particularly true for the sentence stimuli leading to the three-way interaction (Type * SNR * PTA). The TypeSNRTPT interaction occurred because TPT thresholds showed a significant negative correlation with intelligibility for word stimuli at high SNRs. The main effect of LNS occurred because a better storage-based WM score was beneficial for intelligibility in all tested listening situations. Examining the bivariate correlations to understand the interaction between WM processing-heavy RST and SNR suggests that a good score in the RST was most beneficial for listening situations with low SNR, although this relationship did not reach significance in any case. Intelligibility was not affected by inhibition, vocabulary size or reading comprehension abilities. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ease of Language Understanding model and the general finding that cognitive factors matter more at low SNR — relevant to the reader’s interest in cognition of normal hearing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1276