Does increasing the intelligibility of a competing sound source interfere more with speech comprehension in older adults than it does in younger adults?

Abstract

A previous study (Schneider, Daneman, Murphy, & Kwong See, 2000) found that older listeners' decreased ability to recognize individual words in a noisy auditory background was responsible for most, if not all, of the comprehension difficulties older adults experience when listening to a lecture in a background of unintelligible babble. The present study investigated whether the use of a more intelligible distracter (a competing lecture) might reveal an increased susceptibility to distraction in older adults. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired older adults performed poorer than younger adults when everyone was tested in identical listening situations. However, when the listening situation was individually adjusted to compensate for age-related differences in the ability to recognize individual words in noise, age-related difference in comprehension disappeared. Experiment 3 compared the masking effects of a single-talker competing lecture to a babble of 12 voices directly after adjusting for word recognition. The results showed that the competing lecture interfered more than did the babble for both younger and older listeners. Interestingly, an increase in the level of noise had a deleterious effect on listening when the distractor was babble but had no effect when it was a competing lecture. These findings indicated that the speech comprehension difficulties of healthy older adults in noisy backgrounds primarily reflect age-related declines in the ability to recognize individual words.

Ageism and Neuropsychological Tests

“…However, when auditory conditions were individually adjusted to compensate for sensory degradation, these differences were eliminated. In other words, older adults were able to perform as well as younger adults, even in a complex listening comprehension task, when sensory degradation was compensated for (for replication, see Lu et al 2016). These results may be further supported by a recent study indicating that younger adults with hearing impairment show equal cognitive performance to older adults with similar sensory decline (Verhaegen et al 2014).…”

An overview on informational masking

“…In another study conducted in an investigating the speech recognition performance of young and elderly people with normal hearing, it was reported that, the more meaningful the competing noise (competing noise was selected in three ways: part of the speech text, a bubble noise, and single person competing noise), the more the IM would occur. In this study, the poorer performance of the elderly people was attributed to the agerelated decline in their cognitive abilities in word recognition [43]. Some studies have examined the role of age in detecting target speech from competing speech.…”

The effects of auditory spatial training on informational masking release in elderly listeners: a study protocol for a randomized clinical trial

“…Auditory spatial training is designed based on five signs that are important in informational masking release: angular differentiation between target and competing signals 16, 34– 36 ; signal to noise ratio 34 ; similarity and difference between the target and competing signals 12 ; similar or different gender for target and competing signals 12, 37 ; and meaningfulness of the competing signal 12 . As one of the main principles of any auditory training program is progression in difficulty so the training sessions will be divided into three general steps by considering the competing signals.…”

“…Various studies have indicated that with an increase in age, side-effects of competing noises will increase 1, 10– 12 . Different studies have revealed that elderly populations, who do not have peripheral auditory impairment, suffer from diminished ability of using acoustic and phonetic signs to separate speech from background noise, compared to young people; therefore, more informational masking occurs in this population 10, 13 .…”

“…These changes are possibly due to the reduction in the ability of using acoustic and phonetic signs to separate target signals from background noise 11 . Therefore, in elderly people, without considering the peripheral hearing impairment, the ability to use spatial and non-spatial signs for informational masking release diminishes due to the reduction of cognitive processing abilities 11, 12 , temporal processing defects 10 , defects in the connection between hemispheres, and diminished ability to separate simultaneous sounds 11 .…”