Young listeners’ working memory stays irrelevant to speech-in-noise even at very difficult signal levels

Evidence

Taken together, the reported results fail to provide evidence that, in acoustically adverse listening situations, WMC (as measured by the Reading-Span test) is a reliable and strong predictor of SiN intelligibility in young listeners with normal hearing. The new data presented here suggest that WMC becomes more important with age, especially in the oldest participants. One possible explanation for this increasing cognitive involvement with age could be the accumulation of age-related deficits in liminary but also supraliminary auditory processing (e.g. sensitivity to temporal-fine-structure and temporal-envelope cues; Füllgrabe 2013 ; Füllgrabe et al. 2015 ), resulting in under-defined and degraded internal representations of the speech signal, calling for WM-based compensatory mechanisms to aid identification and comprehension. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1154

In conclusion, and consistent with recent efforts to establish if and under which conditions cognitive abilities influence the processing of spoken language (e.g. Fedorenko 2014 ; Heinrich and Knight, this volume), the current results caution against the assumption that WM necessarily supports SiN identification independently of the age and hearing status of the listener. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1157

However, when performance only for the two lowest SNRs (corresponding to 46 RAUs) was considered, WMC was still not associated with SiN identification in the young participants (r = 0.04, p = 0.405, one-tailed). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1138

Categorization

• XREF: This reverses the common Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) framework assumption that cognitive capacity moderates speech perception even in normal hearing — connects to Rönnberg’s model.
• QUESTION: Under what acoustic distortion level does WM load actually emerge for young NH listeners? The ceiling on bottom-up processing may need to be much higher than typical SiN tasks impose.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1154; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1157; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1138