Abstract
Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants’ ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory–cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing.
Highlights
Unlike reading, where one can control the input rate with eye-movements, in the case of spoken language speech rate is controlled by the speaker and not by the listener
Of special note is the effect on sentence comprehension of age-related hearing impairment. The goal of this present study is to examine the effects of hearing impairment in older adults on the comprehension of spoken sentences as the processing difficulty is manipulated by the syntactic complexity of the sentences and the sound level of the presented stimuli
Consistent with expectations it can be seen that comprehension of sentences with the syntactically simpler subject-relative structures was excellent for all three participant groups regardless of sound-level condition, sentence length, or prepositional phrase placement
Summary
Unlike reading, where one can control the input rate with eye-movements, in the case of spoken language speech rate is controlled by the speaker and not by the listener. Adult aging brings special challenges for speech comprehension due to age-related declines in episodic memory (Wingfield and Kahana, 2002), processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), and working memory resources (Salthouse, 1994), all of which can have a negative impact on comprehension of spoken sentences (see reviews in Light, 1990; Carpenter et al, 1994; Wingfield and Lash, 2016). Of special note is the effect on sentence comprehension of age-related hearing impairment The goal of this present study is to examine the effects of hearing impairment in older adults on the comprehension of spoken sentences as the processing difficulty is manipulated by the syntactic complexity of the sentences and the sound level of the presented stimuli
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