What is it about?
This study examined whether people who report greater listening effort also have more difficulty understanding speech. More than 600 adults of different ages and hearing abilities completed speech recognition tests in quiet and noisy listening conditions and rated how much effort, frustration, and performance they experienced during the tasks. The study investigated whether these self-reported workload ratings were related to speech recognition, even after accounting for differences in hearing sensitivity.
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Why is it important?
Standard hearing tests mainly measure how well a person detects sounds or recognizes speech, but they do not always capture how difficult listening feels. This study found that people who reported greater listening effort and frustration generally performed more poorly on speech recognition tasks, even after differences in hearing ability were considered. These findings suggest that asking individuals about their listening effort may provide useful information beyond traditional hearing tests.
Perspectives
Measuring listening workload alongside conventional hearing assessments may help clinicians better understand the everyday listening challenges experienced by adults with hearing loss. Incorporating self-reported effort and frustration into clinical evaluations could support more personalized hearing care and improve the assessment of communication difficulties that are not fully explained by hearing thresholds alone.
Donghyeon Yun
University of Colorado Boulder
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Associations Between Self-Reported Workload and Measures of Speech Recognition in Adults Across the Lifespan, American Journal of Audiology, June 2026, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2026_aja-25-00298.
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