A study of individuals with normal hearing shows that cognitive ability plays a crucial role in successful speech perception.
You’re sitting in a busy café, trying to chat with a friend. The background noise makes it tough to follow what they’re saying. It might seem like a hearing aid would fix the problem, but new research indicates that difficulty understanding speech in noisy places may also be linked to cognitive ability.
Researchers examined three groups: people with autism, people with fetal alcohol syndrome, and a neurotypical control group. Everyone had typical hearing. The team found a significant connection between cognitive ability and how well participants processed speech amid competing sounds.
“The relationship between cognitive ability and speech-perception performance transcended diagnostic categories. That finding was consistent across all three groups,” said the study’s lead investigator, Bonnie Lau. She 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.
The findings were published today in the journal PLOS One.
Importance and Scope of Findings
Lau emphasized that the study was relatively small, involving fewer than 50 participants, and should be confirmed with larger groups before drawing broad conclusions. Still, she noted that the results highlight how intellectual ability is one of the factors that affects a person’s capacity to follow conversations in challenging sound environments, such as busy classrooms or social gatherings.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers designed a study that included people with autism and fetal alcohol syndrome. People with those conditions, despite having typical hearing, frequently report difficulty listening in noisy environments. And groups of people with those “neurodivergent” conditions represented a wider range of IQ scores — some of them higher, Lau emphasized — than would be seen among neurotypical participants alone.
The study participants were 12 people with autism, 10 with fetal alcohol syndrome, and 27 age- and biological sex-matched people in a control group. They ranged in age from 13 to 47 years.
All participants first underwent an audiology screening to confirm clinically normal hearing. They were then equipped with headphones and a computer program that posed a complex listening challenge.
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 primary speaker’s voice was always male, and the secondary voices were male and female or both male. Each voice stated a single sentence that began with a call sign followed by a color and number, for example: “Ready, Eagle, go to green five now.”
On the computer program, study participants were tasked to select a colored, numbered box that corresponded to the primary speaker’s statement, while the volume of the secondary voices gradually increased.
Testing Cognitive Ability
Subsequently, participants underwent brief, standardized tests of intelligence, including verbal and nonverbal ability, and perceptual reasoning. Those scores were analyzed 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 reported. “Intellectual ability was significantly correlated with speech perception thresholds in all three groups.”
A lot of brain processing contributes to successful listening in complex environments, Lau said.
“You have to segregate the streams of speech. You have to figure out and selectively attend to the person that you’re interested in, and part of that is suppressing the competing noise characteristics. 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, we’re nodding. All these factors increase the cognitive load of communicating when it is noisy.”
The study directly addresses a common misconception, Lau added, that any person who has trouble listening is suffering from peripheral hearing loss.
“You don’t have to have a hearing loss to have a hard time listening in a restaurant or any other challenging real-world situation,” she said.
The authors suggested that neurodivergent individuals and individuals with lower cognitive ability could benefit from an assessment of the environments that may challenge their complex listening thresholds. This could lead to helpful classroom interventions, for instance, such as moving a child to the front row or providing hearing-assistive technology.
Reference: “The relationship between intellectual ability and auditory multitalker speech perception in neurodivergent individuals” 24 September 2025, PLOS One.
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8 Comments
“Intellectual ability was significantly correlated with speech perception thresholds in all three groups.”
That isn’t really surprising. Brighter people probably have larger working vocabularies and may be quicker to find a missing word that fits the context of the conversation. I suspect the results of the very small-size experiment are confounded by different reasons for having difficulty understanding speech and the unstated assumption that all issues are related to hearing pathologies instead of the assumption that different reasons can have similar results that resemble hearing pathologies. While apparently the “intellectual ability” was measured, or at least ranked, it appears that the other characteristics were just binned and not assessed on a scale. Perhaps the more important question is why do even the brightest sometimes have perception problems?
From what I have read, during WWII, there was a preference for females to communicate with males in the field, such as pilots, because it was assumed that the young males would automatically focus on what a female was saying. Could having male and female voices in the background confound the results by males shifting attention to the female voice? Well designed experiments seem to be a rarity these days, especially in medicine and social sciences.
There are people I know who can engage in conversations in very loud situations, but they are not particularly bright in terms of problem-solving or aptitude. This is not a cut-and-dry finding, more of a causal relationship based on compensation of specific regions of the brain at best.
Cognitive ability may be a factor, but there is also the mechanical factors of the hearing components, age, and so on. Either the mechanical factors of hear and age are strong factors or we’re all just getting dumb as we grow older.
I think your sample population was too small and incorrectly identified. Your question was if higher IQ people can pick out a conversation in a noisy environment better than people whose IQ’s might not be quite as high. You had people in your test group suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome or from autism. (And there is no shame in any of this, people are different, which is one of the things that makes us interesting.)
You also didn’t test for experience. Someone who is frequently in high noise environments will have had more practice in picking out a specific conversation than someone who has not.
I didn’t see anything about variations in people’s voices, either (The source of the sounds). Some people mumble, some don’t speak clearly, and some shout.
I have been accused of being able to hear grass grow and hear paint drying, and I have also been accused of being very, very smart – I am not saying this to boast – but I do have difficulty in picking out a specific conversation in a noisy environment. I understand that an anecdote does not make data, but my personal experience which is at great variance from your results tells me the study was deficient.
And no, I am not getting dumber as I age. I’m 79 and people think I’m 60.
It also helps if you know what you are listening for. My airplane is pretty loud inside, but I have no trouble with ATC because the conversations are pre-defined and structured. In a bar or at a party, the conversations are a free-for-all.
Go back and do it again . . .
Damn. I’m a moron.
I have Aspergers. Always scored high on IQ tests. Put me in a room with lots of people talking and, after only a few minutes, I can only hear a jumble of noise as all the voices mix together into an indecipherable mess.
Exactly this. The study would be better off understanding ASD in these terms, not IQ. That’s too inflammatory. I have a higher than average but not genius level IQ, but I am on the ADHD/Autism spectrum and have never been able to hear conversations in pubs or venues, whilst my NT friends appear to be able to have whole conversations. I know my hearing is decent, but has decreased as I’m mid 50s.
The problem with conversations in loud environments were a thing in my 20s and ever since. I find it so tiring.
T. C. Chamberlain (1890) advocated what he called “The method of multiple working hypotheses.” Had these researchers followed the advice, they might have considered the possibility of having cause and effect backwards. That is, defective hearing is responsible for an apparent decline in I.Q., which would explain the correlation across all three groups. I don’t think that it is highly probable, but it is an oversight to have not considered it and designed the experiment in a way to be able to eliminate it.