Correlates of older adults’ discrimination of acoustic properties in speech

Abstract

Auditory discrimination of speech stimuli is an essential tool in speech and language therapy, for example, in dysarthria rehabilitation. It is unclear, however, which listener characteristics are associated with the ability to perceive differences between one's own utterance and target speech. Knowledge about such associations may help to support patients participating in speech and language therapy programs that involve auditory discrimination tasks. Discrimination performance was evaluated in 96 healthy participants over 60 years of age as individuals with dysarthria are typically in this age group. Participants compared meaningful words and sentences on the dimensions of loudness, pitch, and speech rate. Auditory abilities were assessed using pure-tone audiometry, speech audiometry, and speech understanding in noise. Cognitive measures included auditory short-term memory, working memory, and processing speed. Linguistic functioning was assessed by means of vocabulary knowledge and language proficiency. Exploratory factor analyses showed that discrimination performance was primarily associated with cognitive and linguistic skills, rather than auditory abilities. Accordingly, older adults' discrimination performance was mainly predicted by cognitive and linguistic skills. Discrimination accuracy was higher in older adults with better speech understanding in noise, faster processing speed, and better language proficiency, but accuracy decreased with age. This raises the question whether these associations generalize to clinical populations and, if so, whether patients with better cognitive or linguistic skills may benefit more from discriminationbased therapeutic approaches than patients with poorer cognitive or linguistic abilities.

Catecholaminergic Modulation of Semantic Processing in Sentence Comprehension

“…Participants’ baseline levels of performance was tested on a set of widely used individual difference measures before capsule administration, including two WM tasks (i.e., automatic reading span and operation span) ( Daneman and Carpenter 1980 ; Unsworth et al. 2005 ), a language proficiency task ( Neger et al. 2015 ), a perceptual speed task (i.e., box completion) ( Salthouse 1993 ), and an ADHD DSM-IV rating scale ( DuPaul et al.…”