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People experience increased mental effort when listening to disordered speech
What is it about?
People commonly report that speakers with neurological speech disorders are more difficult to understand. However, measurement of these difficulties has been mostly subjective. This study examines behavioral listening effort using a word recall paradigm. The primary task involved speech transcription. As listeners completed this task, they were also asked to retain and recall words from previous sentences. Results showed that listeners remembered fewer words when transcribing disordered speech versus neurotypical speech. Even words that were fully intelligible were less likely to be accurately recalled.
Why is it important?
These results suggest that listeners require more cognitive resources to process disordered speech. When more cognitive resources are required, listeners may experience difficulties multi-tasking or remembering aspects of their conversations.