Speaker
Description
Understanding speech in background noise is a complex task, and adolescents persistently perform worse than adults in situations in which the competing noise is composed of interfering talkers (informational masking). The underlying mechanisms explaining this protracted development of performance are still not completely understood although they could be related to the recruitement of cognitive resources. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential differences in listening effort between adolescents and adults, in different types of maskers and different intelligibility levels. Considering that listening effort does not reflect intelligibility scores, investigating listening effort might provide more insights to the differences observed between adolescents and adults in intelligibility measures. Pupil dilation was measured in children (12-13 years old) and young adults with typical hearing during a speech intelligibility task against two types of maskers (speech-shaped noise and 2-talker speech) and at two intelligibility levels (50 and 84% correct responses). Working memory was evaluated using the backward digit span. Data collection is still ongoing. A repeated measures ANOVA will assess the effects of masker type, intelligibility level and age group on pupil dilation. In adults, results show larger peak pupil dilation in the 2-talker condition compared to the SSN condition and larger peak pupil dilation in the 50% compared to the 84% intelligibility level. For speech-in-noise performance, we expect a group difference only in the 2-talker condition. We expect to observe an interaction between group and condition on pupil dilation. Those results could help understand whether performance in children is limited by their cognitive ressources or their ability to allocate those.