Pupil Response as an Indication of Effortful Listening: The Influence of Sentence Intelligibility

The peak dilation amplitude, peak latency, and mean pupil dilation systematically increase with decreasing speech intelligibility. These results support that listening effort, as indicated by the pupil response, increases with decreasing speech intelligibility. This study indicates that pupillometry can be used to examine how listeners reach a certain performance level. Application of this technique to study listening effort can yield valuable insight into the processing resources required across listening conditions and into the factors related to interindividual differences in speech perception in noise.