There is an apparent disparity between the fields of cognitive audiology and cognitive electrophysiology as to how linguistic context is used when listening to perceptually challenging speech. To gain a clearer picture of how listening effort impacts context use, we conducted a pre-registered study to simultaneously examine electrophysiological, pupillometric, and behavioral responses when listening to sentences varying in contextual constraint and acoustic challenge in the same sample. Participants (N = 44) listened to sentences that were highly constraining and completed with expected or unexpected sentence-final words (“The prisoners were planning their escape/party”) or were low-constraint sentences with unexpected sentence-final words (“All day she thought about the party”). Sentences were presented either in quiet or with +3 dB SNR background noise. Pupillometry and EEG were simultaneously recorded and subsequent sentence recognition and word recall were measured. While the N400 expectancy effect was diminished by noise, suggesting impaired real-time context use, we simultaneously observed a beneficial effect of constraint on subsequent recognition memory for degraded speech. Importantly, analyses of trial-to-trial coupling between pupil dilation and N400 amplitude showed that when participants’ showed increased listening effort (i.e., greater pupil dilation), there was a subsequent recovery of the N400 effect, but at the same time, higher effort was related to poorer subsequent sentence recognition and word recall. Collectively, these findings suggest divergent effects of acoustic challenge and listening effort on context use: while noise impairs the rapid use of context to facilitate lexical semantic processing in general, this negative effect is attenuated when listeners show increased effort in response to noise. However, this effort-induced reliance on context for online word processing comes at the cost of poorer subsequent memory.

认知听力学和认知电生理学领域在聆听具有挑战性的语音时如何使用语言环境方面存在明显差异。为了更清楚地了解听力努力如何影响语境使用，我们进行了一项预先注册的研究，以同时检查在同一样本中听语境约束和声学挑战不同的句子时的电生理、瞳孔测量和行为反应。参与者 ( N  = 44) 听了高度限制性的句子，并以预期或意外的句子结尾词完成（“囚犯正在计划逃跑/派对”）或者是低约束的句子，带有意想不到的最后一句话（“她整天都在想派对”）。句子以安静或 +3 dB SNR 背景噪声的形式呈现。同时记录瞳孔测量法和脑电图，并测量随后的句子识别和单词回忆。虽然 N400 预期效应因噪声而减弱，这表明实时上下文使用受损，但我们同时观察到约束对后续语音识别记忆的有益影响。重要的是，对瞳孔扩张和 N400 振幅之间的试验到试验耦合的分析表明，当参与者表现出增加的听力努力（即更大的瞳孔扩张）时，N400 效应随后会恢复，但同时，更高的努力与较差的后续句子识别和单词回忆有关。总的来说，这些发现表明声学挑战和聆听努力对上下文使用的不同影响：虽然噪音会损害上下文的快速使用以促进一般的词汇语义处理，但当听众对噪音表现出更多的努力时，这种负面影响会减弱。然而，这种努力引起的对在线文字处理上下文的依赖是以较差的后续记忆为代价的。