Real-life listening is inherently complex. Everyday environments rarely provide clear speech in anechoic conditions. Instead, they often contain multiple partially masking sound sources, varying spatial configurations, and room acoustic reflections. Moreover, listeners typically rely not only on auditory, but also on visual cues, such as lip-movement, gestures, gaze, and embodiment. Thus, listening performance in such complex environments cannot be predicted from acoustic conditions alone. Recent technological advances enable the simulation of complex auditory and visual environments (e.g., through virtual reality). Still, many studies employ simplified environments when examining listening performance, which may result in findings that do not generalise to real-life.<\/p>\n
The primary objective of this thesis was to assess how systematic increments in auditory and audiovisual complexity affect listening performance, conceptualised in terms of working memory and listening effort. Seven experiments reported in five publications were conducted that gradually increased complexity in controlled steps. The experiments introduced spatial audio reproduction and spatial target and background position changes, varied the semantic content and temporal structure of background noise, examined the influence of display device and audiovisual incongruences in virtual environments with embodied conversational agents and finally investigated the influence of room acoustic conditions in a simulated audiovisually complex environment. Further, throughout the thesis, the complexity of the task was increased from the classical serial recall task with isolated digits as target items towards a joint analysis of memory and listening effort by employing the heard-text-recall task in a dual-task design.<\/p>\n
Across studies, multiple acoustic manipulations, such as the content of the task-irrelevant stimuli and reverberation, showed clear effects on listening performance, whereas the examined variations of visual cues (i.e., display device and audio-visual incongruences) had limited impact. The findings suggest a task-dependent relevance of audiovisual cues and highlight the interdependency of environment, target source, task, and receiver.<\/p>\n
Conclusively, the thesis proposes a framework of audiovisual complexity that extends existing acoustic models by explicitly incorporating visual, receiver-related, and technical dimensions. In addition, a conceptual distinction between descriptive and generative approaches to complexity is introduced, which might aid more differentiated discussions and interpretations of future findings. In this context, this thesis highlights that current simulation-based approaches and experimental paradigms may not capture real-life listening to a sufficient degree, and argues for a more holistic perspective on complex listening scenarios that incorporates behaviour- and experience-based dependent variables.<\/p>\n
Together, these contributions aim to support the design and interpretation of future listening experiments in complex audiovisual environments and to move towards models that are better suited to predicting everyday listening. This way, ultimately, listening experience can be improved particularly for vulnerable listener groups, such as people with hearing impairment.<\/p>\n
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