During a conversation in presence of acoustic or auditory barriers (e.g., background noise or hearing deficits in one of the interlocutors), talkers adapt their speech production to enhance speech clarity, i.e., to produce “clear speech”. Although the literature about clear speech is substantial, its effects on speech intelligibility and cognitive effort are underexplored, mainly because of the lack or inadequacy of the available testing methods. Crucially, standard speech intelligibility testing protocols utilize short target sentences, typically pre-recorded in quiet, and therefore do not allow assessing intelligibility of clear speech produced in background noise or intelligibility in conversational settings. This study explores a novel testing paradigm that, within the framework of a conversational scenario, aims to enable the investigation of voice adaptations in response to acoustic and auditory barriers and their effects on speech intelligibility and cognitive effort. A visual task was used to elicit a conversation between two participants, who were sitting in separate acoustic environments. The acoustic environments of the two participants were controlled separately, allowing the presentation of background noise as an acoustic barrier to none, one or both participants. In each trial of the test, triggered by the visual task, a measure of speech intelligibility was embedded in the conversation through the visual presentation of a written HINT sentence to one participant, who had to read it, and their interlocutor had to repeat it back. Speech intelligibility was scored from the repeated sentence as in standard speech intelligibility tests by a researcher who administered the experiment. During the conversation the participants alternated between talker and listener roles, allowing to separate cognitive effort into speaking effort and listening effort. During speaking turns, speaking effort was measured in terms of a set of voice features (intensity, fundamental frequency, speaking rate and spectral tilt) and pupil dilation. During listening turns, pupil dilation was used as a proxy measure of listening effort. This paradigm might offer a tool for (i) testing speech intelligibility in a more ecological conversational environment compared to standard speech intelligibility tests, (ii) measuring acoustic and linguistic changes in the voices of the participants in response to acoustic and auditory barriers that can be controlled separately for the two interlocutors, and (iii) measuring how these voice changes affect speech intelligibility and cognitive effort. The paradigm will be presented together with preliminary data from young normal-hearing participants.