From Unidirectional to Interactive Communication: Revealing the Impacts of Voice and Noise on Listening and Speaking (UnICoRN)

• Applicant: Isabel Sarah Schiller, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574341080

Listening and speaking are fundamental to human communication. However, under degraded acoustic conditions, both can become demanding, as additional cognitive resources are required to suppress competing auditory input. This is particularly problematic in learning environments such as lecture halls or seminar rooms, where voice disorders among lecturers and background noise can impede knowledge transfer. To date, the effects of voice disorders and noise have mostly been studied from either the listener’s or the speaker’s perspective – reflecting unidirectional communication – even though everyday communication is typically interactive. Moreover, previous studies have predominantly employed unimodal designs, such as audio-only tasks, and have relied on short, highly controlled speech materials (isolated words or unrelated sentences). The extent to which these findings generalise to real-world communication scenarios that are cognitively and linguistically more complex remains unclear. The aim of this project is to investigate the effects of voice and noise on listening and speaking under closer-to-reality conditions, with a specific focus on (1) listening and speaking effort, (2) memory for heard information, and (3) speaking behaviour. In addition, further influencing factors – such as speaker-related visual cues and auditory feedback modulations – are considered. While the research will begin with unimodal, unidirectional paradigms, such as audio-only listening tasks, it will progressively advance to multimodal, interactive scenarios, like audiovisual virtual reality experiments involving turn-taking. Throughout these studies, behavioural measures (error rates and reaction times), physiological indicators (heart rate variability and pupil dilation), and subjective ratings will be evaluated. This allows for a systematic investigation of how, when, and to what extent voice and noise influence communicative processes. This project will significantly deepen our knowledge of acoustic disturbances and their impact on cognitive and linguistic levels of verbal communication. It will contribute to expanding existing speech perception and production models by integrating new findings related to visual influences, auditory feedback mechanisms, and discourse-level language processing, thereby laying the groundwork for future research.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Research Groups