Beyond Consequences of Challenge: the Degree to which Spoken Word Recognition Changes in Response to Difficulty has Independent Relevance

Listeners must often recognize words in challenging listening conditions like background noise. The cognitive mechanisms of spoken word recognition offer a potential locus for adaptation to such contexts. Indeed, research has found that the millisecond-by-millisecond dynamics of word recognition in challenging conditions differ lawfully along a small number of dimensions. However, comparatively little is known about the factors that impact the nature of an individual listener’s response to challenge. Here we ask if this response is stable across time and challenge type, if it is constrained by