Degraded speech encoding as a result of hearing loss increases cognitive load and makes listening effortful. Standard hearing assessment does not capture this cognitive impact of hearing impairment. Speech-in-noise testing measures intelligibility for isolated sentences that are typically not engaging and lack meaningful context. These materials may not capture the processes involved in everyday listening situations, in which people are often intrinsically motivated to comprehend the speech they are hearing. The current study explored a novel approach using natural, spoken stories. We first characterized time courses of executive load during story listening in young individuals with normal hearing using a reaction time (RT) task. We then computed correlations between executive load time courses (operationalized as reaction times) to quantify their reliability. Reaction-time time courses were significantly correlated across participants, suggesting consistent cognitive recruitment across individuals. Synchronization of RTs across participants was related to ratings of story enjoyment, but not absorption, suggesting that enjoyment, one key facet of engagement, predicts the degree to which a story’s cognitive demands are experienced similarly by listeners. Correlated executive load time courses among healthy individuals may be sensitive to abnormal mental states: divergence from the canonical time courses characterized here could serve as a sensitive tool for characterizing listening effort
