Individual differences in older adults’ perception of speech in hospital noise

Abstract

Hospital noise is associated with negative patient outcomes and staff performance issues. One understudied challenge is how hospital noise impacts healthcare provider—patient communication, particularly for information exchanges including less familiar or frequent medical terminology. This issue is of particular importance for older adults who are more likely to be hospitalized and also have greater challenges with speech in noise compared to younger adults. Here, older adults' perception of sentences containing medical terminology varying in word frequency and familiarity was tested in three listening conditions: quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise. Additionally, a range of individual factors that may predict performance were assessed. Preliminary results suggest an interaction between listening condition and lexical characteristics with larger impacts of both lexical frequency and familiarity in the noise conditions than quiet. The word frequency effect was larger in hospital noise than speech-shaped noise. Follow-up analyses will assess how age, hearing thresholds, cognitive decline, vocabulary size, and experience with hospital environments and medical terminology contribute to individual differences in speech intelligibility across the listening conditions and sentence types. [Work supported by the IU Institute for Advanced Study and the James S. McDonnell Foundation https://doi.org/10.37717/2021-3028.]