Recall of Reverberant Speech in Quiet and Four-Talker Babble Noise

• Main Authors: Miseung Koo, Jihui Jeon, Hwayoung Moon, Myung-Whan Suh, Jun-Ho Lee, Seung-Ha Oh, Moo-Kyun Park
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Brain Sciences
• Subjects: reverberation; noise; hearing; speech intelligibility; listening effort
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/11/7/891

Using behavioral evaluation of free recall performance, we investigated whether reverberation and/or noise affected memory performance in normal-hearing adults. Thirty-four participants performed a free-recall task in which they were instructed to repeat the initial word after each sentence and to remember the target words after each list of seven sentences, in a 2 (reverberation) × 2 (noise) factorial design. Pupil dilation responses (baseline and peak pupil dilation) were also recorded sentence-by-sentence while the participants were trying to remember the target words. In noise, speech was presented at an easily audible level using an individualized signal-to-noise ratio (95% speech intelligibility). As expected, recall performance was significantly lower in the noisy environment than in the quiet condition. Regardless of noise interference or reverberation, sentence- baseline values gradually increased with an increase in the number of words to be remembered for a subsequent free-recall task. Long reverberation time had no significant effect on memory retrieval of verbal stimuli or pupillary responses during encoding.