Examining the context benefit in older adults: A combined behavioral-electrophysiologic word identification study

Hearing and cognitive decline in aging differentially impact neural tracking of context-supported versus random speech across linguistic timescales

“…However, we acknowledge that our speech stimuli were only validated on a behavioral level. The N400-like response observed in Figure 2A, although showing increased negativity approximately 400 ms after the target word onset in the random compared to the context condition, was not as distinctive as seen in other studies with older participants (e.g., [46]). Our study did not employ a traditional N400 paradigm with well-validated stimuli known to elicit robust N400 responses, such as the sentences used in the Speech Perception in Noise Test (SPIN-R) [47].…”

Factors Influencing the Semantic Context Benefit to Foreign-accented Word Recognition

“…A large amount of research has proved that the semantic context benefit in foreign-accented speech comprehension could be diminished or enhanced due to the influence of the characteristics of speech stimulus, mainly including noise (Fallon et al, 2002;Bradlow & Alexander, 2007;Holt & Bent, 2017) and the type of accent (Goslin et al, 2012;Bent & Atagi, 2017;Kang et al, 2019), as well as the influence of listener features, mainly involving age (Federmeier et al, 2002;Bieber et al, 2022), vocabulary size (Vafaee, 2020;Du et al, 2022), accent familiarity (Adank et al, 2009;Clopper, 2012), and L2 proficiency (Vandergrift, 2006;Francis et al, 2018;Medina et al, 2020). The current review intends to draw a brief picture of the 6 main factors from listener and stimulus characteristics influencing the semantic context benefit in listening to foreign-accented speech.…”

“…The inconsistency of the mentioned three perspectives may derive from the distinction of the task content of experiment or the different methods to describe the context benefit such as behavioral and electrophysiologic outcome measures as explained by Bieber et al (2022). More recently, based on reflections of the previous studies, Bieber et al (2022) examined the context benefit in native and nonnative accent for younger and older adults with high-predictability sentences and low-predictability sentences as speech stimuli by combining both behavioral and EEG measures. Results showed that even though older adults performed poorer in the condition of low-predictability and nonnative accent, their ability to use context for word recognition did not get weak, which was in line with the first point of view.…”

“…Although a few studies have investigated the semantic context in the condition of native and nonnative talkers (Holt & Bent, 2017;Bieber et al, 2022), accent strength as a variable has seldom been explored in the study on the context benefit in listening comprehension, but it is of significant value to review related findings and include accent in future work because communicating with others in a second or foreign language is common in the global world.…”

“…In general, words in highly constraining sentence contexts are more comprehensible than words in weakly constraining sentence contexts (Kalikow et al, 1977;Holt & Bent, 2017), and words in meaningful sentence contexts are more comprehensible than words in isolation (Creel et al, 2016;. Moreover, most studies on the topic of semantic context benefit have proved that the context benefit is stronger for native listeners than for nonnative listeners (Bradlow & Alexander, 2007;Clopper, 2012), for adults than for children , for younger adults than for older adults (Federmeier et al, 2002;Bieber et al, 2022), and at quiet environment than at noisy environment (Fallon et al, 2002;Bradlow & Alexander, 2007;Sheldon et al, 2008). But there are also studies indicating contradictory conclusions as in the study of Dubno et al (2000) which reveals that older adults benefit as much as younger adults do from semantic context at different degrees.…”