Brain Sciences (Jul 2021)

Recall of Reverberant Speech in Quiet and Four-Talker Babble Noise

  • Miseung Koo,
  • Jihui Jeon,
  • Hwayoung Moon,
  • Myung-Whan Suh,
  • Jun-Ho Lee,
  • Seung-Ha Oh,
  • Moo-Kyun Park

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11070891
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 7
p. 891

Abstract

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Using behavioral evaluation of free recall performance, we investigated whether reverberation and/or noise affected memory performance in normal-hearing adults. Thirty-four participants performed a free-recall task in which they were instructed to repeat the initial word after each sentence and to remember the target words after each list of seven sentences, in a 2 (reverberation) × 2 (noise) factorial design. Pupil dilation responses (baseline and peak pupil dilation) were also recorded sentence-by-sentence while the participants were trying to remember the target words. In noise, speech was presented at an easily audible level using an individualized signal-to-noise ratio (95% speech intelligibility). As expected, recall performance was significantly lower in the noisy environment than in the quiet condition. Regardless of noise interference or reverberation, sentence- baseline values gradually increased with an increase in the number of words to be remembered for a subsequent free-recall task. Long reverberation time had no significant effect on memory retrieval of verbal stimuli or pupillary responses during encoding.

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