The irrelevant speech effect in listeners with normal hearing and self-reported hearing loss

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE) depends on psychoacoustic features such as the perceived fluctuation of the sound. Thus, it seems likely that a hearing loss may also affect the amount of the ISE. The present experiment studied the ISE in 30 listeners with normal hearing and 30 listeners with self-reported hearing loss in four different background sounds: speech, music with vocals, instrumental music without lyrics, steady noise. As expected, short-term memory performance increased in that order for both groups. However, there was no statistically significant interaction between the two groups, both memorized 0.9 digits more in noise than in speech.