Effect of Speaker Age on Speech Recognition and Perceived Listening Effort in Older Adults With Hearing Loss

Abstract

Purpose: Older adults exhibit difficulty understanding speech that has been experimentally degraded. Age-related changes to the speech mechanism lead to natural degradations in signal quality. We tested the hypothesis that older adults with hearing loss would exhibit declines in speech recognition when listening to the speech of older adults, compared with the speech of younger adults, and would report greater amounts of listening effort in this task.Methods: Nineteen individuals with age-related hearing loss completed speech recognition and listening effort scaling tasks. Both were conducted in quiet, when listening to high and low predictability phrases produced by younger and older speakers respectively.Results: No significant difference in speech recognition existed when stimuli were derived from younger or older speakers. However, perceived effort was significantly higher when listening to speech from older adults, as compared to younger adults. Conclusions:For older individuals with hearing loss, natural degradations in signal quality may require greater listening effort. However, they do not interfere with speech recognition -at least in quiet. Follow-up investigation of the effect of speaker age on speech recognition and listening effort under more challenging noise conditions appears warranted.

Comparison of Single-Task versus Dual-Task for Listening Effort

“…No significant difference in speech recognition existed when stimuli were derived from younger and older speakers. However, perceived effort was significantly higher when listening to speech from older adults, as compared with younger adults [ 24 ]. That study revealed that older listeners with hearing loss exhibited similar levels of speech understanding when listening to the speech of younger and older adults.…”

Impact of Background Noise and Sentence Complexity on Processing Demands during Sentence Comprehension

“…After the final noise offset, the participants were prompted to decide whether the sentence matched the picture or not via a button press (left or right mouse button). After the comprehension task, the participants were instructed to rate how difficult it was to understand the sentence using a continuous visual analog scale ( McAuliffe et al, 2012 ). They were asked to indicate their rating by positioning a mouse on a continuous slider marked “easy” and “difficult” at the extremes.…”

Cognitive–Perceptual Examination of Remediation Approaches to Hypokinetic Dysarthria

“…A trained research assistant transcribed listener responses in real time. Responses were also audio-recorded, and the transcriptions were crosschecked prior to data coding and analysis (as per McAuliffe et al, 2012McAuliffe et al, , 2013. We chose this process over a standard computer-based transcription task because it enables younger listener transcriptions to be compared with older listener transcriptions (e.g., McAuliffe et al, 2013).…”

“…Perceptual selection and acoustic verification. As is usual in studies of this kind, a phrase selection and verification process was undertaken (e.g., Borrie et al, 2012;Liss et al, 1998Liss et al, , 2000McAuliffe, Wilding, Rickard, & O'Beirne, 2012). The intent of this process was to select phrases from each speaker that most strongly conformed to our perceptual criteria (as judged by two expert judges, the first and third authors) and subsequently to verify acoustically these perceptual impressions.…”