Competing Speech Perception in Middle Age

Helfer, Karen S.

doi:10.1044/2015_aja-14-0056

Cited by 19 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…In order to meet the study criterion of 80% correct sentence recognition in the single task, MA adults needed a better SNR of 1.4dB compared to the young adults. In line with previous research ( Helfer and Freyman, 2014 ; Degeest et al, 2015 ; Dubno, 2015 ; Helfer, 2015 ), this finding underscores the known difficulties of MA adults to process speech in noise. Several explanations were offered in the literature to the reduced speech perception ability in the presence of normal hearing acuity.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

A Clinical Paradigm for Listening Effort Assessment in Middle-Aged Listeners

2022

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Listening effort (LE) has been known to characterize speech recognition in noise regardless of hearing sensitivity and age. Whereas the behavioral measure of dual-task paradigm effectively manifests the cognitive cost that listeners exert when processing speech in background noise, there is no consensus as to a clinical procedure that might best express LE. In order to assess the cognitive load underlying speech recognition in noise and promote counselling for coping strategies, a feasible clinical paradigm is warranted. The ecological validity of such a paradigm might best be demonstrated in middle-aged adults, exhibiting intact hearing sensitivity on one hand, however, experiencing difficulties in degraded listening conditions, unaware of the implicated cognitive cost of speech recognition in noise. To this end, we constructed a dual-task paradigm that consists of a primary task of sentences-in-noise recognition and a secondary task of simple visual colored-shape matching. Research objective was to develop a clinical paradigm for the assessment of LE in middle-aged adults. Participants were 17 middle-aged adults (mean age of 52.81 years) and 23 young adults (mean age of 24.90 years). All participants had normal hearing according to age. Speech stimuli consisted of the Hebrew Matrix sentences in noise test. SRTn was obtained for 80% correct identification. Visual stimuli were colored geometric shapes. Outcome measures were obtained initially for each task separately, to establish performance ability, and then obtained simultaneously. Reaction time and accuracy in the secondary task were the defined metrics for LE. Results: LE was indicated for both groups, however, was more pronounced in the middle-aged, manifested in the visual accuracy and reaction time metrics. Both groups maintained the 80% correct recognition-in-noise in the dual-task, however, the middle-aged group necessitated a better SNR of 1.4dB than the normal hearing group. Moreover, the middle-aged group was taxed in a greater prolongation of reaction time, in order to uphold the correct recognition. Conclusion: a dual-task paradigm consisting of sentences-in-noise primary task combined with a simple secondary task successfully showed different manifestations of LE in middle-aged adults compared to young adults, thus approximating the use of such a paradigm in a clinical setting.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

A Clinical Paradigm for Listening Effort Assessment in Middle-Aged Listeners

2022

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“…The latter of these responses (masker approximations) are likely due to a breakdown in segregation combined with susceptibility to energetic masking: That is, listeners selected the wrong word, and energetic masking led to portions of that word to become inaudible. This increase in the masker's influence appears to begin by middle age, in line with prior work showing that middle-aged listeners have more difficulty understanding speech in a competing speech background than younger listeners (Glyde, Cameron, Dillon, Hickson, & Seeto, 2013;Helfer, 2015;Helfer & Jesse, 2015;Helfer & Vargo, 2009). In this study, the increased influence of the masker across the adult life span was not only evident in phonological intrusions in the responses but also in the probability of reporting both masker words on a trial.…”

Section: Changes In the Influence Of The Masker On Speech Perception supporting

confidence: 89%

Lexical Influences on Errors in Masked Speech Perception in Younger, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

Jesse

Helfer

2019

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose In situations with a competing talker, lexical properties of words in both streams affect the recognition of words in the to-be-attended target stream. In this study, we tested whether these lexical properties also influence the type of errors made by listeners across the adult life span. Method Errors from a corpus collected by Helfer and Jesse (2015) were categorized as phonologically similar to words in the target and/or masker streams. Younger, middle-aged, and older listeners had produced these errors when trying to identify key words from a target stream while ignoring a single-talker masker. Neighborhood density and lexical frequency of target words and masker words had been manipulated independently. Results Lexical properties of target words influenced all types of errors. With higher frequency maskers, the probability of responding with a masker word increased and the phonological influence of target words decreased. Lower levels of lexical competition for maskers increased the probability that listeners reported a word phonologically related to both masker and target words. The influence of masker words increased across the adult life span, as evidenced by phonological intrusions into responses and the temporary failure in selectively attending to the target stream. The effects of lexical properties on error patterns, however, were consistent across age groups. Conclusions The ease of recognition of words in both attended and unattended speech influences the breakdown of speech perception. These influences remain robust across the adult life span.

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“…More than 80% of our older listeners were over the age of 60 years. However, recent research indicates that age-related temporal processing and cognitive decline-each of which may have influenced performance on the task-begin to emerge in middle age (Grose, Mamo, Buss, & Hall, 2015;Gunstad et al, 2006;Helfer, 2015). Therefore, gradations in performance may be more noticeable between middle-aged and older listeners, rather than among older listeners alone, as was the case with younger and older listeners here.…”

Section: Young Listeners Outperform Ohi Listenersmentioning

confidence: 59%

Identification of the Spectrotemporal Modulations That Support Speech Intelligibility in Hearing-Impaired and Normal-Hearing Listeners

Venezia

Martin

Hickok

et al. 2019

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose Age-related sensorineural hearing loss can dramatically affect speech recognition performance due to reduced audibility and suprathreshold distortion of spectrotemporal information. Normal aging produces changes within the central auditory system that impose further distortions. The goal of this study was to characterize the effects of aging and hearing loss on perceptual representations of speech. Method We asked whether speech intelligibility is supported by different patterns of spectrotemporal modulations (STMs) in older listeners compared to young normal-hearing listeners. We recruited 3 groups of participants: 20 older hearing-impaired (OHI) listeners, 19 age-matched normal-hearing listeners, and 10 young normal-hearing (YNH) listeners. Listeners performed a speech recognition task in which randomly selected regions of the speech STM spectrum were revealed from trial to trial. The overall amount of STM information was varied using an up–down staircase to hold performance at 50% correct. Ordinal regression was used to estimate weights showing which regions of the STM spectrum were associated with good performance (a “classification image” or CImg). Results The results indicated that (a) large-scale CImg patterns did not differ between the 3 groups; (b) weights in a small region of the CImg decreased systematically as hearing loss increased; (c) CImgs were also nonsystematically distorted in OHI listeners, and the magnitude of this distortion predicted speech recognition performance even after accounting for audibility; and (d) YNH listeners performed better overall than the older groups. Conclusion We conclude that OHI/older normal-hearing listeners rely on the same speech STMs as YNH listeners but encode this information less efficiently. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7859981

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Competing Speech Perception in Middle Age

Cited by 19 publications

References 37 publications

A Clinical Paradigm for Listening Effort Assessment in Middle-Aged Listeners

A Clinical Paradigm for Listening Effort Assessment in Middle-Aged Listeners

Lexical Influences on Errors in Masked Speech Perception in Younger, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

Identification of the Spectrotemporal Modulations That Support Speech Intelligibility in Hearing-Impaired and Normal-Hearing Listeners

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