Drew J. McLaughlin's research while affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis and other places

... While relatively less problematic than the effect of removing visual cues, the use of face coverings was found to negatively impact each of the subjective aspects of communication measured. Even small effects like these can accumulate over extended periods, especially in less favourable listening conditions, requiring more cognitive resources and potentially leading to fatigue (Carraturo et al., 2023;McGarrigle et al., 2014). ...

... CTS has been suggested to reflect the capacity of neural oscillations to synchronize, or phase-lock, with quasi-rhythmic information contained in slow amplitude modulations of speech (speech envelope). CTS is commonly observed in temporal brain regions and within the delta (<4 Hz) and theta (4 -8 Hz) frequency bands, aligning with the prosodic and syllabic rhythms in the speech envelope, respectively Peelle, Gross, and Davis, 2013;Doelling et al., 2014;Molinaro and Lizarazu, 2018;Destoky et al., 2019;Bourguignon et al., 2020;Ershaid et al., 2024). It has been suggested that CTS is an important part of speech processing because it helps separate and decode continuous speech signals into linguistic units at different timescales (Ahissar et al., 2001;Giraud and Poeppel, 2012;Peelle and Davis, 2012;Peelle et al., 2013;Zoefel and VanRullen, 2015;Ding et al., 2016;Keitel, Gross, and Kayser, 2018;Kosem et al., 2018;Meyer and Gumbert, 2018;Lizarazu, Carreiras and Molinaro, 2023). ...

... Further work has also reexamined social priming for L2 accent, with varying outcomes. In a recent conceptual replication and expansion of McGowan (2015), our lab found that White American listeners were better able to understand Mandarin-accented English when paired with an East Asian, as compared to a White, face (McLaughlin & Van Engen, 2023b). Our data further showed that this difference was significant beginning at Trial 1, demonstrating that the priming effect was extremely rapid. ...

... A manipulation in number of talkers potentially produces variability in both acoustic (e.g., a broader distribution of acoustic features) and indexical (e.g., multiple-talker identities, multiple-talker genders) domains. Experimental conditions in which the talker varies trial-by-trial, as compared to single-talker or blocked-talker conditions, can impact speech processing, manifesting in slower, more effortful, or more inaccurate recognition of speech (Choi et al., 2018;McLaughlin et al., 2023;Mullennix et al., 1989;Sommers, 1997;Stilp & Theodore, 2020). These effects have been observed even when the talkers are highly familiar to the listeners (Magnuson et al., 2021). ...

... Listening effort, assessed using pupillometry, also increased with more challenging SNRs, with SNR 0 resulting in the greatest change in pupil diameter. Pupillometry has rapidly gained prominence as a tool to assess cognitive load and effortful listening, which is modulated by task difficulty, cognitive status and hearing acuity 28,53,[80][81][82][83][84] . The precise neural pathways that induce pupillary changes during listening is still under study, but it is hypothesized to be mediated by the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. ...

... Currently, the degree of success in implementing clear speech and its effectiveness in enhancing intelligibility are assessed perceptually by clinicians. The subjective nature of this auditory-perceptual assessment poses several challenges associated with human perception, including speaker familiarity, context familiarity, and variability across clinicians (Babel and Russell, 2015;McGowan, 2015;Kutlu et al., 2022;McLaughlin and Van Engen, 2022). An acoustic-based approach would provide a solution as it is free of these biases, and identifying a biomarker for implementation of clear speech is the first step toward developing such an approach. ...

... Yi and colleagues interpreted this correlation as an indicator that biases toward Asian speakers may negatively affect the process of audiovisual integration for speech. However, in a direct replication of this study with a larger sample size (N = 260 as compared to N = 19 in Yi et al., 2013) McLaughlin et al. (2022 did not find evidence that IAT scores were related to reduced audiovisual benefit for Korean-accented English. The main difference in audiovisual benefit for Korean-accented versus American-accented speakers successfully replicated, and a follow-up experiment further demonstrated that this finding was not due to a confound of the overall difficulty level of each accent type. ...

... It remains an open question whether the amplitude of evoked pupil responses from this reduced baseline is dampened in aging. Some studies have reported higher task-evoked dilation for older adults (Piquado et al., 2010), whereas others have reported the opposite phenomenon , an issue which also depends on the statistical approach taken (McLaughlin et al., 2022). In any case, researchers should be cautious when conducting between-subjects contrasts such as younger vs. older adults because their canonical pupil response functions likely differ in ways that are not yet fully understood. ...

... For example, older and younger adults appear to be differentially motivated by monetary reward to participate in effortful listening, independent of self-reported socioeconomic status. McLaughlin et al. (2021) observed that, compared to younger adults, normal-hearing older adults chose to engage in less demanding SNRs, forgoing a larger monetary reward. A greater tendency to exhibit this pattern of discounting behavior was found among older adults with poorer hearing thresholds and smaller working memory capacities. ...

... This variability is known to make the recognition of unfamiliar talkers or accents difficult (Adank and Janse, 2010;Porretta et al., 2016). These difficulties can, however, dissipate as listeners adapt to the current input (Bradlow and Bent, 2008;Tzeng et al., 2016;Baese-Berk et al., 2020;Xie et al., 2021). For example, native listeners of English become significantly faster and more accurate in responding to Spanish-or Mandarin-accented speech within as few as 18 sentence-length utterances (Clarke and Garrett, 2004;Xie et al., 2018). ...