A group of older adults with good hearing and a group with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for recall of the final three words heard in a running memory task. Near perfect recall of the final words of the three-word sets by both good- and poor-hearing participants allowed the inference that all three words had been correctly identified. Nevertheless, the poor-hearing group recalled significantly fewer of the nonfinal words than did the better hearing group. This was true even though both groups were matched for age, education, and verbal ability. Results were taken as support for an effortfulness hypothesis: the notion that the extra effort that a hearing-impaired listener must expend to achieve perceptual success comes at the cost of processing resources that might otherwise be available for encoding the speech content in memory.

A dual-task interference paradigm was used to investigate the effect of perceptual effort on recall of spoken word-lists by younger and older adults with good hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. In addition to poorer recall accuracy, listeners with hearing loss, especially older adults, showed larger secondary task costs while recalling the word-lists even though the stimuli were presented at a sound intensity that allowed correct word identification. Findings support the hypothesis that extra effort at the sensory-perceptual level attendant to hearing loss has negative consequences to downstream recall, an effect that may be further magnified with increased age.Keywords hearing loss; aging; speech processing; dual-task; memory Age-related hearing loss is the third most prevalent chronic medical condition among older adults (Lethbridge-Ceijku, Schiller, & Bernadel, 2004). When accompanied by age-related declines in attentional resources (Craik & Byrd, 1982), working memory capacity (Kausler, 1994), and processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), one can see the challenge facing many older adults as they attempt to comprehend and remember fast-paced speech in their everyday lives. In addition to missed or incorrectly identified words, diminished hearing may also lead to impoverished, less discriminable memory traces (Surprenant, 2007). There is, however, an additional concern. As argued initially by Rabbitt (1968Rabbitt ( , 1991, and subsequently supported by others, successful perception in the face of degraded input may come at the cost of attentional resources that might otherwise be available for encoding what has been heard in memory (e.g., McCoy, Tun, Cox, Colangelo, Stewart & Wingfield, 2005;Murphy, Craik, Li & Schneider, 2000;Pichora-Fuller, 2003;van Boxtel et al., 2000; Suprenant, 1999 Suprenant, , 2007.This potential contributor to poorer memory performance associated with hearing loss, a socalled "effortfulness hypothesis", has until now been inferred from performance on the memory task itself. This hypothesis would thus be strengthened by an independent measure of resource allocation attendant to successful recognition by individuals with good versus poor hearing. One solution is to use a dual-task paradigm in which participants are asked to listen to and recall speech materials as a primary task while also conducting a concurrent secondary task.Address Correspondence to: Dr. Patricia A. Tun, Volen National Center for Complex Systems (MS 013), Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, Tel: 781-736-3273, Fax: 781-736-3275, tun@brandeis.edu or wingfield@brandeis.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated version. The American Psychological Association and its Council of Editors disclaim any responsibility or liabilities for errors or omissions of this manuscript version, any ver...

Comprehension of spoken language by older adults depends not only on effects of hearing acuity and age-related cognitive change but also on characteristics of the message, such as syntactic complexity and presentation rate. When younger and older adults with clinically normal hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested on comprehension of short spoken sentences that varied in syntactic complexity, minimal effects of age and hearing were seen in comprehension of syntactically simpler sentences, even at rapid speech rates. By contrast, both age and hearing loss were associated with poorer comprehension for more syntactically complex sentences, and these differences were further exacerbated by increases in speech rate. These findings illustrate a dynamic interaction between age, hearing acuity, and characteristics of the spoken message on speech comprehension.

Adult aging is accompanied by declines in many areas of cognitive functioning, including reduced memory for new information. Potential sources of these declines are well established and include slowed processing, diminished working-memory capacity, and a reduced ability to inhibit interference. In addition, older adults often experience sensory decline, including decreased hearing acuity for high-frequency sounds and deficits in frequency and temporal resolution. These changes add to the challenge faced by older adults in comprehension and memory for everyday rapid speech. Use of contextual information and added perceptual and cognitive effort can partially offset the deleterious effects of these sensory declines. This may, however, come at a cost to resources that might otherwise be available for “downstream” operations such as encoding the speech content in memory. We argue that future research should focus not only on sensory and cognitive functioning as separate domains but also on the dynamics of their interaction.

Comprehension of rapid speech in complex environments is constrained by a number of factors. On the sensory side, the listener must deal with rapid, often poorly articulated speech, a challenge that is exacerbated in older adults with high-frequency hearing loss and reduced efficiency in temporal processing and frequency discrimination. These ''bottom-up'' declines can be ameliorated by ''top-down'' use of linguistic context for recognition of words as the speech unfolds in time and also for retrospective recognition of an indistinct word based on the context that follows it. A second major factor in speech comprehension is the use of prosody, to include pitch contour, stress, and temporal patterning, such as the lengthening of clause-final words to signal that a clause boundary has been reached. In all adults, and especially older adults, these operations are constrained by limitations in working memory or processing resources, a factor that shows bidirectional interaction with sensory challenge. We describe work from our and others' laboratories on speech comprehension and memory investigating each of these factors in young and older adults with good hearing and with mild to moderate hearing loss.Learning Outcomes: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to (1) identify key concepts from cognitive aging theory (such as working memory and speed of processing) that affect the older listener's ability to process spoken language and (2) describe the interaction of sensory and cognitive changes with aging.