Speech perception is one of many everyday activities that draws increasingly on central cognitive resources as task difficulty increases. Results indicate that listening effort is reduced when sentences are predictable and that cognitive load affects the processing of spoken words in sentence contexts. Participants’ working memory and vocabulary were not correlated with the sentence context benefit in either word recognition or digit recall. In addition, under high cognitive load, words were identified more slowly and digits were recalled more slowly and less accurately than under low load. For word and digit recall response time but not for digit recall accuracy, the effect of predictability remained significant after exclusion of trials with incorrect word responses and was thus independent of speech intelligibility. In addition, digits were recalled more quickly and accurately on trials on which the sentence was predictable, indicating reduced listening effort for predictable compared to unpredictable sentences. Words were identified more quickly and accurately in predictable than unpredictable sentence contexts. Each trial began with visual presentation of a short (low-load) or long (high-load) sequence of to-be-remembered digits. Young adults with normal hearing listened to sentences masked by multitalker babble in which sentence-final words were either predictable or unpredictable. A sequential dual-task design was used to assess the impacts of spoken sentence context and cognitive load on listening effort.
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