Fundamental Dimensions of Real-Time Word Recognition in Challenging Listening Conditions Exhibit Within-Subject Stability and Link to Outcomes

Listeners of all ages and hearing abilities must contend with the fact that speech is often heard in challenging conditions. Research has found that the process of spoken word recognition changes in these contexts, but what these changes represent and whether they have meaningful effects on outcomes was unknown. Here, we build on recent work by applying a PCA approach to eye-tracking data to show that these changes reflect a set of underlying dimensions that are shared across two types of challenging listening (noise and vocoding). Moreover, we show that individual listener’s use of each dimension is largely consistent across challenge types and is predicted by domain-general factors. Finally, we show that changes to word recognition offer indirect benefits to performance in challenging conditions, but only for some listeners. Together, this provides a thorough account of how word recognition operates in difficult contexts.