The April 2019 issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research includes a paper by Dr. Zhao Ellen Peng and Dr. Lily Wang on “Listening Effort by Native and Nonnative Listeners Due to Noise, Reverberation, and Talker Foreign Accent During English Speech Perception”! The article presents more results from Ellen’s PhD work at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Results show that adverse acoustics required more effortful listening as measured subjectively with a self-report NASA Task Load Index questionnaire. This subjective scale was more sensitive than a dual task that involved speech comprehension at capturing the negative impacts of listening effort from acoustic factors (for example, background noise level and reverberation time), talker accent, and listener language abilities.
