Abstract
Speech perception is critical to everyday life. Oftentimes noise can degrade a speech signal; however, because of the cues available to the listener, such as visual and semantic cues, noise rarely prevents conversations from continuing. The interaction of visual and semantic cues in aiding speech perception has been studied in young adults, but the extent to which these two cues interact for older adults has not been studied. To investigate the effect of visual and semantic cues on speech perception in older and younger adults, we recruited forty-five young adults (ages 18–35) and thirty-three older adults (ages 60–90) to participate in a speech perception task. Participants were presented with semantically meaningful and anomalous sentences in audio-only and audio-visual conditions. We hypothesized that young adults would outperform older adults across SNRs, modalities, and semantic contexts. In addition, we hypothesized that both young and older adults would receive a greater benefit from a semantically meaningful context in the audio-visual relative to audio-only modality. We predicted that young adults would receive greater visual benefit in semantically meaningful contexts relative to anomalous contexts. However, we predicted that older adults could receive a greater visual benefit in either semantically meaningful or anomalous contexts. Results suggested that in the most supportive context, that is, semantically meaningful sentences presented in the audiovisual modality, older adults performed similarly to young adults. In addition, both groups received the same amount of visual and meaningful benefit. Lastly, across groups, a semantically meaningful context provided more benefit in the audio-visual modality relative to the audio-only modality, and the presence of visual cues provided more benefit in semantically meaningful contexts relative to anomalous contexts. These results suggest that older adults can perceive speech as well as younger adults when both semantic and visual cues are available to the listener.
Highlights
Perhaps the most critical feature of the complex auditory soundscape in which we live is the speech of the people around us
The present study investigated the role of age on the ability to use visual and semantic cues to understand speech in a noisy environment
In both audio-only and audio-visual presentation modalities, as the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) became easier, older and younger adults responded correctly more often, and the difference between the age groups in responding correctly increased, with young adults scoring higher than older adults
Summary
Perhaps the most critical feature of the complex auditory soundscape in which we live is the speech of the people around us. Background noise often degrades the speech signal, noise rarely disrupts ongoing conversations. This is partly due to various contextual cues listeners use to mitigate the deleterious effects of background noise. While there are other cues listeners may use to understand speech in challenging situations, the modulatory influences of visual cues and semantic context are well-studied in young adults and known to be important for speech perception in noise [4,5,6]. Prior research in young adults suggests that individual differences in speech perception in noise can be partly explained by differential use of visual cues and semantic context. We investigate the interaction of these two cues in enhancing speech perception across age groups
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