Cognitive ability is significantly associated with how well people with typical hearing process speech in noisy environments, an American study suggests.
The researchers studied three groups – people with autism and individuals with foetal alcohol syndrome, groups who they said frequently reported difficulty listening in noisy environments – and a “neurotypical” control group.
Findings, reported in PLOS One on 24 September 2025, demonstrated that intellectual ability was among variables that influence how well people hear in complex acoustic settings such as classrooms and social events.
“The relationship between cognitive ability and speech-perception performance transcended diagnostic categories,” said the lead investigator, Assistant Professor Bonnie Lau. “That finding was consistent across all three groups.”
A/Prof Lau is a research assistant professor in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine and directs lab studies of auditory brain development.
She said the groups with neurodivergent conditions represented a wider range of IQ scores – some higher – than among neurotypical participants alone.
Researchers studied 12 people with autism, 10 with foetal alcohol syndrome, and 27 age- and biological sex-matched people in a control group. They ranged from 13 to 47 years old.
All participants underwent an audiology screening to confirm clinically normal hearing before receiving headphones and undertaking a listening challenge on a computer.
Participants were introduced to a primary speaker’s voice and instructed to attend to that speaker’s voice as two other background voices emerged, all speaking simultaneously.
The main speaker’s voice was always male, and the secondary voices male and female or both male. Each voice stated a single sentence that began with a call sign followed by a colour and number, such as: “Ready, Eagle, go to green five now.”
Participants were tasked to select a coloured, numbered box that corresponded to the main speaker’s statement, while the volume of secondary voices gradually increased.
IQ and speech perception
Participants underwent intelligence tests, including verbal and nonverbal ability, and perceptual reasoning. Scores were analysed against individuals’ scores on the multitalker listening challenge.
“We found a highly significant relationship between directly assessed intellectual ability and multitalker speech perception,” the researchers said. “Intellectual ability was significantly correlated with speech perception thresholds in all three groups.”
A/Prof Lau said a lot of brain processing contributed to successful listening in complex environments.
“You have to segregate streams of speech and figure out and selectively attend to the person that you’re interested in, and part of that is suppressing the competing noise characteristics,” she said.
“Then you have to comprehend from a linguistic standpoint, coding each phoneme, discerning syllables and words. There are semantic and social skills, too — we’re smiling and nodding; these factors increase the cognitive load of communicating when it is noisy.”
She said the study addressed a common misconception – that any person who had trouble listening had peripheral hearing loss.
“You don’t have to have hearing loss to have a hard time listening in a restaurant or any other challenging real-world situation,” she said.
The authors suggested neurodivergent individuals and people with lower cognitive ability could benefit from an assessment of environments that may challenge their complex listening thresholds. This could lead to classroom interventions such as moving a child to the front or providing hearing-assistive technology.
A/Prof Lau said the study size of less than 50 participants warranted validation in a larger study.
