13th February SSF talk by Max Paulus

Talk abstract:

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in objective measures of listening effort in both academic and industrial contexts. In particular, research quantifying arousal and effort by means of pupil dilation has seen an enormous growth. If we aim at applying such a sensitive measure in real-world communication settings, we ought to understand how pupil dilation varies not only as a function of channel degradation, but also as a function of talker characteristics. In this talk, I will present results from two studies that investigated the effect of speaking rate and time-compression on listening effort, as indexed by the pupil dilation response and perceived effort ratings. In the first study, normal-hearing listeners were presented slow and fast speech in noise at low levels of intelligibility. In the second study, hearing-impaired listeners were presented with slow and fast speech at high levels of intelligibility and varying room acoustics, simulated using higher order ambisonics sound reconstruction. Results show that pupil dilation is indeed sensitive to talker characteristics, but also to the signal processing applied.