Listening effort is difficult to detect in a person’s voice: implications for audiology evaluations and conversation partners

PurposeListening can be more effortful for a variety of reasons, including when a person must mentally repair a word that they misperceived while hearing a sentence. The current study explored whether a secondary listener (in the role of a tester/clinician) could detect that effort using voice cues.MethodStimuli were audio recordings of thirteen adults with cochlear implants repeating sentences that were either intact or with a masked word that could be inferred/repaired using context (the latter of which were previously documented to elicit greater effort). Participants (n = 171, including 28 audiologists) used a continuous visual analog scale to judge whether the talker heard one type of stimulus or the other. Participants were also surveyed for experiences relating to detecting effort or confusion in a talker’s voice. ResultsParticipant judges were unable to discern when the CI listeners were forced to effortfully infer words from context when repeating a sentence. Ratings indicated a general bias toward assuming the listener heard the original sentence correctly without any need for repair. Acoustic properties of the listeners’ voices (higher voice pitch, delayed verbal reaction time) did not reliably correlate with ratings of uncertainty. There were also no statistically detectable advantages for audiologists or for people who reported experience or skill in discerning uncertainty in a talker’s voice. ConclusionsDespite clear evidence that mental repair incurs extra effort, the process of mental repair gives no reliably perceptible signature in a talker’s voice, even for audiologists and others who profess to have experience and skill in conversing with people who have hearing loss. Listening effort is at risk of going unnoticed by conversation partners and by audiologists who might underestimate a patient’s effort when listening to speech.