TY - GEN
T1 - The effect of voice cue differences on performance and effort during speech-on-speech listening
AU - Koelewijn, Thomas
AU - Başkent, Deniz
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Koelewijn et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Speech perception during two talker listening conditions can be challenging and effortful, especially in hearing impaired individuals. Perceiving differences in voice cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), seems to help segregating competing talkers, and improve speech understanding. Pupil dilation is an objective measure for cognitive processing load while listening to speech, also referred to as listening effort. Speech-on-speech perception relies on cognitive mechanisms such as inhibition of a speech masker, and as a result can be more effortful than a non-speech masker. However, it is unknown how voice cue differences can affect effort during speech-on-speech listening. In this study, participants listened to everyday sentences masked by competing speech consisting of random sentence segments (target to masker ratio = -6 dB) both uttered by the same talker. During the experiment, F0 and VTL voice cues of the speech masker were systematically manipulated and listening effort was measured by means of pupillometry. Results show that when F0 and/or VTL differed between target and masker speech speech-on-speech listening improved. Improvements in performance co-occurred with smaller peak pupil dilation responses during listening, indicating a decrease in listening effort. These outcomes provide a first insight on the impact of voice discriminability on listening effort.
AB - Speech perception during two talker listening conditions can be challenging and effortful, especially in hearing impaired individuals. Perceiving differences in voice cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), seems to help segregating competing talkers, and improve speech understanding. Pupil dilation is an objective measure for cognitive processing load while listening to speech, also referred to as listening effort. Speech-on-speech perception relies on cognitive mechanisms such as inhibition of a speech masker, and as a result can be more effortful than a non-speech masker. However, it is unknown how voice cue differences can affect effort during speech-on-speech listening. In this study, participants listened to everyday sentences masked by competing speech consisting of random sentence segments (target to masker ratio = -6 dB) both uttered by the same talker. During the experiment, F0 and VTL voice cues of the speech masker were systematically manipulated and listening effort was measured by means of pupillometry. Results show that when F0 and/or VTL differed between target and masker speech speech-on-speech listening improved. Improvements in performance co-occurred with smaller peak pupil dilation responses during listening, indicating a decrease in listening effort. These outcomes provide a first insight on the impact of voice discriminability on listening effort.
KW - listening effort
KW - pupillometry
KW - speech perception
KW - Voice cues
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85191265048&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85191265048
T3 - Proceedings of Forum Acusticum
BT - Forum Acusticum 2023 - 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, EAA 2023
PB - European Acoustics Association, EAA
T2 - 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, EAA 2023
Y2 - 11 September 2023 through 15 September 2023
ER -