Effects of Age and Uncertainty on the Visual Speech Benefit in Noise

Abstract

Purpose: Listeners understand significantly more speech in noise when the talker's face can be seen (visual speech) in comparison to an auditory-only baseline (a visual speech benefit). This study investigated whether the visual speech benefit is reduced when the correspondence between auditory and visual speech is uncertain and whether any reduction is affected by listener age (older vs. younger) and how severe the auditory signal is masked. Method: Older and younger adults completed a speech recognition in noise task that included an auditory-only condition and four auditory–visual (AV) conditions in which one, two, four, or six silent talking face videos were presented. One face always matched the auditory signal; the other face(s) did not. Auditory speech was presented in noise at −6 and −1 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Results: When the SNR was −6 dB, for both age groups, the standard-sized visual speech benefit reduced as more talking faces were presented. When the SNR was −1 dB, younger adults received the standard-sized visual speech benefit even when two talking faces were presented, whereas older adults did not. Conclusions: The size of the visual speech benefit obtained by older adults was always smaller when AV correspondence was uncertain; this was not the case for younger adults. Difficulty establishing AV correspondence may be a factor that limits older adults' speech recognition in noisy AV environments. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16879549

Visual Speech Improves Older and Younger Adults’ Response Time and Accuracy for Speech Comprehension in Noise

“…The accuracy results were consistent with this expectation, that is, although both age groups were more accurate for the visual speech conditions in comparison to the static conditions, there was not a significant age effect or visual distraction effect for speech comprehension accuracy. The finding that both younger and older adults performed more accurately for both AV conditions in comparison to the AO one is compatible with studies that have used speech recognition tasks (Beadle et al, 2021;Cienkowski & Carney, 2002;Jesse & Janse, 2012;Tye-Murray et al, 2016).…”

“…Visual speech, i.e., seeing a talker's face, has been shown to have a large facilitatory effect on speech recognition in noise for older and younger adults ( Beadle et al, 2021 ; Sommers et al, 2005 ; Tye-Murray et al, 2016 ). That is, when listeners are presented with words or sentences in noise and asked to recall what was said, recognition performance is better for an auditory-visual (AV) speech condition in comparison to auditory-only (AO) one (i.e., the visual speech benefit).…”

“…Other evidence consistent with the idea that being able to utilize visual speech requires cognitive resources, and thus can disproportionately affect older adults, comes from studies that have increased the need for participants to pay attention to the task. For example, studies using sentence recognition tasks have shown that the size of older adults’ visual speech benefit declines when the location of a target talker is visually uncertain (e.g., when there is more than one possible target talker in a visual scene, Beadle et al, 2021 ), and when there is a visual distraction (i.e., an additional visual stimulus not relevant to the target visual speech, Cohen & Gordon-Salant, 2017 ).…”