Absorption and enjoyment during listening to acoustically masked stories

Comprehension of speech masked by background sound requires increased cognitive processing, which makes listening effortful. Research in hearing has focused on such challenging listening experiences, in part because they are thought to contribute to social withdrawal in people with hearing impairment. Research has focused less on positive listening experiences, such as enjoyment and absorption/engagement, despite their potential importance in motivating effortful listening. Moreover, the artificial speech materials – such as disconnected, brief sentences – commonly utilized to investigate speech intelligibility and listening effort may be ill-suited to capture positive experiences when listening is challenging. Here, we investigate how listening to naturalistic spoken stories under acoustic challenges influences the quality of listening experiences. We show (1) that story absorption and enjoyment are only minimally affected by moderate speech masking although listening effort increases; (2) that familiarity with the Harry Potter books and/or movies, providing thematic knowledge, increases absorption and enjoyment and reduces listening effort when listening to the audio of a Harry-Potter summary presented in multi-talker babble; and (3) that absorption and enjoyment increase and effort decreases over time as individuals listen to several stories successively in multi-talker babble. Our research indicates that naturalistic, spoken stories can reveal several concurrent listening experiences and that familiarity with a narrative can increase engagement and reduce effort. Our work also demonstrates that, although listening effort may increase with speech degradation, listeners may still find the experience both absorbing and enjoyable.