Influences on lip-reading ability: Aging, sensory, and cognitive functions

Abstract

To explore the previously reported effect of aging on lip-reading ability, older (60-75 years) and younger (18-35) adults gave oral responses to sentences from a modified version of the build-a-sentence (BAS) test [Tye-Murray et al., Int. J. Acoust., 47(S2), S31-S37, (2008)]. These sentences have predictable syntactic form but contain some words selected from a randomized list of nouns, e.g., ‘The duck watched the cop’. Participants identified these nouns from videos of a single female talker, and responses were transcribed by the experimenter. The 30 participants (15 native English speakers in each age group) were also tested for general cognitive function, vision, hearing, working memory (WM), attention, inhibition, and speech motor ability. They were also asked to gauge their own lip-reading abilities. Preliminary results indicate that the cognitive variables have effects independent of age. Sentence length and syntactic complexity contributed differently in the two age groups, perhaps due to WM capacity.