Background/Study Context Older adults, especially those with reduced hearing acuity, can make good use of linguistic context in word recognition. Less is known about the effects of the weighted distribution of probable target and non-target words that fit the sentence context (response entropy). The present study examined the effects of age, hearing acuity, linguistic context, and response entropy on spoken word recognition. Methods Participants were 18 older adults with good hearing acuity (M age = 74.3 years), 18 older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (M age = 76.1 years) and 18 young adults with age-normal hearing (M age = 19.6 years). Participants heard sentence-final words using a word-onset gating paradigm, in which words were heard with increasing amounts of onset information until they could be correctly identified. Degrees of context varied from a neutral context to a high context condition. Results Older adults with poor hearing acuity required a greater amount of word onset information for recognition of words when heard in a neutral context compared to older adults with good hearing acuity and young adults. This difference progressively decreased with an increase in words’ contextual probability. Unlike the young adults, both older adult groups’ word recognition thresholds were sensitive to response entropy. Response entropy was not affected by hearing acuity. Conclusions Increasing linguistic context mitigates the negative effect of age and hearing loss on word recognition. The effect of response entropy on older adults’ word recognition is discussed in terms of an age-related inhibition deficit.

In spite of the rapidity of everyday speech, older adults tend to keep up relatively well in day-to-day listening. In laboratory settings older adults do not respond as quickly as younger adults in off-line tests of sentence comprehension, but the question is whether comprehension itself is actually slower. Two unique features of the human eye were used to address this question. First, we tracked eye-movements as 20 young adults and 20 healthy older adults listened to sentences that referred to one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Although the older adults took longer to indicate the referenced object with a cursor-pointing response, their gaze moved to the correct object as rapidly as that of the younger adults. Second, we concurrently measured dilation of the pupil of the eye as a physiological index of effort. This measure revealed that although poorer hearing acuity did not slow processing, success came at the cost of greater processing effort.

The comprehension of spoken language has been characterized by a number of “local” theories that have focused on specific aspects of the task: models of word recognition, models of selective attention, accounts of thematic role assignment at the sentence level, and so forth. The ease of language understanding (ELU) model (Rönnberg et al., 2013) stands as one of the few attempts to offer a fully encompassing framework for language understanding. In this paper we discuss interactions between perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive factors in spoken language understanding. Central to our presentation is an examination of aspects of the ELU model that apply especially to spoken language comprehension in adult aging, where speed of processing, working memory capacity, and hearing acuity are often compromised. We discuss, in relation to the ELU model, conceptions of working memory and its capacity limitations, the use of linguistic context to aid in speech recognition and the importance of inhibitory control, and language comprehension at the sentence level. Throughout this paper we offer a constructive look at the ELU model; where it is strong and where there are gaps to be filled.

Bruner and Potter (1964) demonstrated the surprising finding that incrementally increasing the clarity of images until they were correctly recognized (ascending presentation) was less effective for recognition than presenting images in a single presentation at that same clarity level. This has been attributed to interference from incorrect perceptual hypotheses formed on the initial presentations under ascending conditions. We demonstrate an analogous effect for spoken word recognition in older adults, with the size of the effect predicted by working memory span. This effect did not appear for young adults, whose group spans exceeded that of the older adults.

Objectives. Everyday speech understanding frequently occurs in perceptually demanding environments, for example due to background noise and normal age-related hearing loss. The resulting degraded speech signals increase listening effort, which gives rise to negative downstream effects on subsequent memory and comprehension, even when speech is intelligible. In two experiments, we explored whether the presentation of realistic assistive text captioned speech offsets the negative effects of background noise and hearing impairment on multiple measures of speech memory.Design. In Experiment 1, young normal hearing adults (N = 48) listened to sentences for immediate recall and delayed recognition memory. Speech was presented in quiet or in two levels of background noise. Sentences were either presented as speech only or as text captioned speech. Thus, the experiment followed a 2 (caption vs no caption) x 3 (no noise, +7 dB SNR, +3 dB SNR) within-subjects design. In Experiment 2, a group of older adults (age range : 61 – 80, N = 31), with varying levels of hearing acuity completed the same experimental task as in Experiment 1. For both experiments, immediate recall, recognition memory accuracy, and recognition memory confidence were analyzed via general(ized) linear mixed effects models. In addition, we examined individual differences as a function of hearing acuity in Experiment 2.Results. In Experiment 1, we found that the presentation of realistic text-captioned speech in young normal-hearing listeners improved immediate recall, delayed recognition memory accuracy, and memory confidence compared to speech alone. Moreover, text captions attenuated the negative effects of background noise on all speech memory outcomes. In Experiment 2, we replicated the same pattern of results in a sample of older adults with varying levels of hearing acuity. Moreover, we showed that the negative effects of hearing loss on speech memory in older adulthood were attenuated by the presentation of text captions.Conclusion. Collectively, these findings suggest that listeners can rapidly integrate text and speech, and that the simultaneous presentation of text can offset the negative effects of effortful listening on speech memory.