Development of an Australian behavioural method for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels

Abstract

Objective

To develop and validate an Australian version of a behavioural test for assessing listening task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels.

Design

In the SWIR-Aus test, listeners perform two tasks: identify the last word of each of seven sentences in a list and recall the identified words after each list. First, the test material was developed by creating seven-sentence lists with similar final-word features. Then, for the validation, participant’s performance on the SWIR-Aus test was compared when a binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on and off.

Study sample

All participants in this study had normal hearing thresholds. Nine participants (23.8–56.0 years) participated in the characterisation of the speech material. Another thirteen participants (18.4–59.1 years) participated in a pilot test to determine the SNR to use at the validation stage. Finally, twenty-four new participants (20.0–56.9 years) participated in the validation of the test.

Results

The results of the validation of the test showed that recall and identification scores were significantly better when the binary mask noise reduction algorithm was on compared to off.

Conclusions

The SWIR-Aus test was developed using Australian speech material and can be used for assessing task difficulty at high speech intelligibility levels.

Keywords:

• Dual task paradigm
• SWIR test
• working memory
• task difficulty

Acknowledgements

The Bionics Institute acknowledges the support it receives from the Victorian Government through its Operational Infrastructure Support Program. The authors appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers that improved the quality of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The lists of sentences created and data collected in the different experiments of the study has been made available on the Open Science Framework platform. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/C9HXP. If the sound files are needed for research purposes, the developers of the AusTIN test, who have the ownership of the speech material, should be asked.

Additional information

Funding

CAC is supported by scholarships from the Demant Foundation and Melbourne University.