Evaluating listeners’ attention to and comprehension of serialy interleaved, rate-accelerated speech

In Navy command operations, individual watchstanders must often concurrently monitor two or more channels of spoken communications at a time, which in turn can undermine information awareness and decision performance. Recent basic work on this operational challenge has shown that a virtual auditory display solution, in which competing messages are presented one at a time at faster rates of speech, can achieve large and significant improvements on diminished measures of listening performance observed in concurrent monitoring at normal speaking rates with equivalent materials. In the third of a series of experiments developed to address performance questions the parameters of this framework raise for listeners, dependent measures of attention and comprehension were compared in a two factor design that manipulated how serial turns among four talkers were organized and their rate of speech. Although both factors impacted performance, the resulting measures remained substantially higher than corresponding measures of performance with concurrent talkers in an earlier study.