Effects of auditory fatigue on speech intelligibility and lexical decision in noise.

The influence of weak auditory fatigue on speech identification and lexical decision (word/nonword) was studied. It appears that, at a low listening level and in presence of a strong masking noise, auditory fatigue gives rise to: (1) a decrease in identification scores, (2) more frequent confusions for fricatives, (3) a reduction in correct lexical decision scores, (4) an increase in the tendency to respond "word" more often than "nonword" (5) a slight increase in reaction times for incorrectly repeated items. The intelligibility impairment can be attributed to a combination of masking and fatigue effects. Errors in lexical decisions and changes in response times are explained by an adaptation of the lexical decision processes to the degraded perceptual representations of the stimuli. There is no clear evidence in this experiment that a very central component of auditory fatigue influences lexical decisions.