Subjective Listening Effort and Electrodermal Activity in Listening Situations with Reverberation and Noise

Disturbing factors like reverberation or ambient noise can impair speech recognition and raise the listening effort needed for successful communication in daily life. Situations with high listening effort are thought to result in increased stress for the listener. The aim of this study was to explore possible measures to determine listening effort in situations with varying background noise and reverberation. For this purpose, subjective ratings of listening effort, speech recognition, and stress level, together with the electrodermal activity as a measure of the autonomic stress reaction, were investigated. It was expected that the electrodermal activity would show different stress levels in different acoustic situations and might serve as an alternative to subjective ratings. Ten young normal-hearing and 17 elderly hearing-impaired subjects listened to sentences from the Oldenburg sentence test either with stationary background noise or with reverberation. Four listening situations were generated, an easy and a hard one for each of the two disturbing factors, which were related to each other by the Speech Transmission Index. The easy situation resulted in 100% and the hard situation resulted in 30 to 80% speech recognition. The results of the subjective ratings showed significant differences between the easy and the hard listening situations in both subject groups. Two methods of analyzing the electrodermal activity values revealed similar, but nonsignificant trends. Significant correlations between subjective ratings and physiological electrodermal activity data were observed for normal-hearing subjects in the noise situation.