Federated study on auditory characteristics related to selective listening

Selective listening is an essential characteristic of smooth speech communication. Many papers report that temporal and frequency resolution of the auditory system and cognitive abilities play important roles in selective listening. However, it is unclear which abilities contribute to selective listening and to what extent. Previous studies have examined individual auditory characteristics, and no studies have examined them federated. This study aims to clarify the contribution of each ability to selective listening. We measured various auditory characteristics in the same participants to clarify the relationship between selective listening and each characteristic. Word intelligibility in noise and word intelligibility in dichotic listening were used as indices of selective listening. The measured auditory characteristics were a masking threshold, gap detection thresholds, amplitude modulation detection thresholds, temporal modulation transfer function, and N-back memory tasks. The results showed that none of the auditory characteristics alone could explain selective listening. This paper also reports on the results of the path analysis conducted to show the contribution pathways.