Sentence recognition in older adults

Abstract

Many older adults report difficulty when listening to speech in background noise. These difficulties may arise from some combination of factors, including age-related hearing loss, auditory sensory processing difficulties, and/or general cognitive decline. To perform well in everyday noisy environments, listeners must quickly adapt, switch attention, and adjust to multiple sources of variability in both the signal and listening environments. Sentence recognition tests in noise have been useful for assessing speech understanding abilities because they require a combination of basic sensory/perceptual abilities as well as cognitive resources and processing operations. This study was designed to explore several factors underlying individual differences in aided speech understanding in older adults. We examined the relations between measures of speech perception, cognition, and self-reported listening difficulties in a group of aging adults (N = 40, age range 60–86) and a group of young normal hearing listeners (N = 28, age range 18–30). All participants completed a comprehensive battery of tests, including cognitive, psychophysical, speech understanding, as well as the SSQ self-report scale. While controlling for audibility, speech understanding declined with age and was strongly correlated with psychophysical measures, cognition, and self-reported speech understanding difficulties. [Work supported by NIH: NIDCD grant T32-DC00012 and NIA grant R01-AG008293 to Indiana University.]