Language
How do personal traits affect how hard we work to listen?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Physical stress responses and self-reported mental effort do not align when people listen to noisy or foreign-accented speech, and they are shaped differently by individual cognitive abilities.
Key findings
Participants rated listening to speech in noise as requiring significantly more mental effort than listening to accented speech, despite having nearly identical comprehension scores in both conditions. Listeners with greater working memory capacity achieved better story comprehension scores. Interestingly, physiological markers of stress did not correlate with subjective effort ratings, and only a decrease in blood volume pulse amplitude predicted stronger comprehension performance.
Methodology
Researchers tested 35 healthy adults in different listening situations: native English speech masked by background noise, and unmasked Chinese-accented English speech. They adjusted the noise level for each person to ensure that basic word recognition performance was equal. While participants listened to 12 short stories and answered questions, the researchers tracked their self-reported effort alongside physiological responses like skin sweating, heart rate, blood vessel constriction, and facial muscle tension.
Limitations
This study cannot establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship because it relies on correlations between pre-existing listener traits and effort responses. Additionally, the final sample of 35 participants is relatively small and spans a wide age range, which might introduce confounding physiological differences. Lastly, the findings are restricted to a single nonnative accent and type of background noise, so they may not generalize to other speech challenges.
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