Effect of noise, dysphonic voice and individual differences on speech intelligibility and comprehension

Noisy classrooms and the poor voice quality of the teacher decrease children’s speech understanding and comprehension. Emerging evidence demonstrates that cognitive factors such as working memory (WM), attention, and inhibitory control (IC) also mediate children’s ability to recognize speech in noise and dysphonic voices. Speech recognition and comprehension tests were performed in a sound-proof booth with 15 normal-hearing elementary students. The speech material was recorded with a nor- mal and mimicked dysphonic voice. Babble noise was added to obtain 2 signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios at 12 and 0 dB. Recognition, comprehension and subjective listening effort scores were collected and children’s WM and IC were evaluated to explain individual differences. Results showed a statistically significant decrease in recognition performance when SNR was decreasing and in comprehension performance in the presence of the dysphonic voice. Subjective listening effort increased for both lower SNR and in the presence of dysphonic voice. Finally, greater selective attention was associated with better recognition and comprehension performance while greater working memory capacity was associated with decreased listening effort.