Moderate Reverberation Does Not Increase Subjective Fatigue, Subjective Listening Effort, or Behavioral Listening Effort in School-Aged Children

Abstract

Background noise and reverberation levels in typical classrooms have negative effects on speech recognition, but their effects on listening effort and fatigue are less well understood. Based on the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening, noise and reverberation would be expected to increase both listening effort and fatigue. However, previous investigations of the effects of reverberation for adults have resulted in mixed findings. Some discrepancies in the literature might be accounted for by methodological differences; behavioral and subjective indices of listening effort do not often align in adults. The effects of sustained listening on self-reported fatigue in school-aged children are also not well understood. The purposes of this project were to (1) evaluate the effects of noise and reverberation on listening effort in school-aged children using behavioral and subjective measures, (2) compare subjective and behavioral indices of listening effort, and (3) evaluate the effects of reverberation on self-reported fatigue. Twenty typically developing children (10–17 years old) participated. Participants completed dual-task testing in two rooms that varied in terms of reverberation, an audiometric sound booth and a moderately reverberant room. In each room, testing was completed in quiet and in two levels of background noise. Participants provided subjective ratings of listening effort after completing the dual-task in each listening condition. Subjective ratings of fatigue were completed before and after testing in each level of reverberation. Results revealed background noise, not reverberation, increased behavioral and subjective listening effort. Subjective ratings of perceived performance, ease of listening, and desire to control the listening situation revealed a similar pattern of results as word recognition performance, making them poor candidates for providing an indication of behavioral listening effort. However, ratings of time perception were moderately correlated with behavioral listening effort. Finally, sustained listening for approximately 25 min increased self-reported fatigue, although changes in fatigue were comparable in low and moderately reverberant environments. In total, these data offer no evidence that a moderate level of reverberation increases listening effort or fatigue, but the data do support the reduction of background noise in classrooms.

Listener characteristics differentially affect self-reported and physiological measures of effort associated with two challenging listening conditions

“…First, we observed that SNR, which corresponded to Target level in the accented condition, had opposite effects on self-assessed effort ratings across the two conditions. We interpret this finding as consistent with the growing consensus that, when asked to rate effort levels, listeners may be evaluating different subjective qualities of the task and/or their task-related internal state in response to different kinds of challenges (Picou et al, 2019 ), and thus listeners’ responses may have been addressing or affected by different properties of the task in the two conditions.…”

“…One concern in the study of listening effort is that various measures may reflect something other than, or in addition to, the engagement of cognitive resources, especially internal assessments of performance (Picou et al, 2019 ) or affective response to task conditions or demands (Francis and Love, 2020 ). In addition, recent research demonstrates that self-report and physiological measures of listening effort may not, in fact, be reflecting the same underlying processes, or at least not doing so to the same degree (Alhanbali et al, 2019 ; Lau et al, 2019 ; Strand et al, 2018 ).…”

“…In studies of listening effort across different conditions, it is typically considered important to ensure that participants are performing equivalently in all conditions so that self-assessment of performance does not confound measures of effort (Picou, Bean, Marcrum, Hornsby, & Ricketts, 2019 ). In an attempt to approximately match performance across the two tasks for each individual, we used a multistage approach to (1) assess recognition of words produced by the nonnative speaker; (2) estimate two signal-to-noise ratios for achieving word recognition scores for native-accented speech presented in speech-shaped noise that were toward the upper and lower end of the individual’s abilities; (3) using linear interpolation between these two points, estimate an SNR for the native-accented speech that would result in similar performance compared with nonnative accented speech.…”

Listening Effort in School-Aged Children With Limited Useable Hearing Unilaterally: Examining the Effects of a Personal, Digital Remote Microphone System and a Contralateral Routing of Signal System

“…Speech understanding and listening effort are related, yet distinct concepts as people with hearing loss often complain that listening is tiring and effortful even when speech is audible, and words are recognized correctly ( Pichora-Fuller et al., 2016 ). Furthermore, some factors affect listening effort and not speech recognition (e.g., digital noise reduction; Sarampalis et al., 2009 ) or affect recognition but not listening effort (e.g., reverberation; Picou et al., 2019a ). Therefore, examining listening effort in addition to speech understanding can be of clinical importance, especially for school-aged children.…”

Esforço auditivo e registro do controle parassimpático do coração durante o reconhecimento de sentenças: estudo piloto

“…Compreender a fala em ambientes acústicos ruidosos é uma tarefa complexa e que exige maior esforço 5 . Durante o esforço auditivo, é necessário a ativação de diversos recursos cognitivos responsáveis pelo processamento e interpretação da informação auditiva, maiores níveis de atenção e memória, e uma interação dinâmica entre o processamento por meio das vias descendentes (top-down) e ascendentes (bottom-up) 6,7,8 .…”