Talker Intelligibility and Listening Effort with Temporally Modified Speech

Individual differences in talker acoustics substantially affect intelligibility in adverse listening conditions. Spectral enhancement has been found to reliably boost intelligibility in noise while temporal enhancement remains less effective. A potentially mediating factor that has been ignored so far is listening effort, as objectively assessed by the pupil dilation response. In two perception experiments, we measured intelligibility (keyword recall scores) and listening effort (pupil dilation) for two talkers in two listening conditions and with varying degrees of temporal modification. Results suggest that while keyword recall scores are sensitive to individual talker differences across listening conditions, the pupil dilation response reflects the degree of temporal and spectral distortion introduced by the signal processing techniques.