<p>Auditory Working Memory Explains Variance in Speech Recognition in Older Listeners Under Adverse Listening Conditions</p>

Abstract

Introduction: Older listeners have difficulty understanding speech in unfavorable listening conditions. To compensate for acoustic degradation, cognitive processing skills, such as working memory, need to be engaged. Despite prior findings on the association between working memory and speech recognition in various listening conditions, it is not yet clear whether the modality of stimuli presentation for working memory tasks should be auditory or visual. Given the modality-specific characteristics of working memory, we hypothesized that auditory working memory capacity could predict speech recognition performance in adverse listening conditions for older listeners and that the contribution of auditory working memory to speech recognition would depend on the task and listening condition. Methods: Seventy-six older listeners and twenty younger listeners completed four kinds of auditory working memory tasks, including digit and speech span tasks, and sentence recognition tasks in four different listening conditions having multi-talker noise and timecompression. For older listeners, cognitive function was screened using the Mini-Mental Status Examination, and audibility was assured. Results: Auditory working memory, as measured by listening span, significantly predicted speech recognition performance in adverse listening conditions for older listeners. A linear regression model showed speech recognition performance for older listeners could be explained by auditory working memory whilst controlling for the impact of age and hearing sensitivity. Discussion: Measuring working memory in the auditory modality facilitated explaining the variance in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions for older listeners. The linguistic features and the complexity of the auditory stimuli may affect the association between working memory and speech recognition performance. Conclusion: We demonstrated the contribution of auditory working memory to speech recognition in unfavorable listening conditions in older populations. Taking the modalityspecific characteristics of working memory into account may be a key to better understand the difficulty in speech recognition in daily listening conditions for older listeners.

No link between Speech-in-noise perception and Auditory short-term memory – evidence from a large cohort of older and younger listeners

“…It is commonly quantified with reading span or digit span tasks that require participants to encode, and manipulate, information in memory over short durations (e.g., read a series of sentences aloud and remember the final word of each sentence; report, following a delay, the order of visually or auditorily presented digits). A large body of work has demonstrated that better WM ability predicts better Speech in Noise (SiN) reception performance (Akeroyd, 2008;Bosen & Barry, 2020;Füllgrabe et al, 2015;Gordon-Salant & Cole, 2016;Kim et al, 2020;Pichora-Fuller, Alain, & Schneider, 2017;Rönnberg et al, 2016;Rudner, Rönnberg, & Lunner, 2011;Wong, Roy, & Margulis, 2009). Similar findings were also recently reported by Lad et al, (2020) using a non-speech-based WM task where participants actively adjusted the frequency and amplitude modulation of a pure tone to match a previously presented token.…”

“…Speech understanding in noisy environments (e.g. following an announcement at a train station, or a friend's voice in the pub) depends not only on hearing acuity but also on a host of cognitive skills including attention, memory and executive function that support listeners' ability to segregate, track and attend to a 'target' signal among interference (de Kerangal, Vickers, & Chait, 2021;Heinrich, Henshaw, & Ferguson, 2015;Holmes, Zeidman, Friston, & Griffiths, 2021;Kim, Choi, Schwalje, Kim, & Lee, 2020;Lad, Holmes, Chu, & Griffiths, 2020; D. R. Moore et al, 2014;Roberts & Allen, 2016). Identifying the cognitive aspects that affect listening outcomes in crowded scenes is a critical prerequisite for interpreting individual variability and understanding the challenges listeners with different cognitive profiles might face during listening.…”

Processing of Degraded Speech in Brain Disorders

“…Attention is essential for encoding precision or gain: the weighting of sensory input by its reliability [ 113 , 114 ]. Verbal auditory working memory—the “phonological loop”—is integral to degraded speech processing [ 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 ], and selective attention importantly interacts with the verbal short term store to sharpen the precision of perceptual priors held in mind over an interval (for example, during articulatory rehearsal on phonological discrimination tasks: [ 119 ]). Listeners with poorer auditory working memory capacity have more difficulty understanding speech-in-noise, even after accounting for age differences and peripheral hearing loss [ 77 , 120 , 121 ].…”

Effect of Noise Reduction on Cortical Speech-in-Noise Processing and Its Variance due to Individual Noise Tolerance

“…Studies using a reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter 1980) have extensively investigated the association between working memory and NR processing [see review, Souza et al (2015)]. Although it is well-established that working memory capacity affects speech-in-noise performance (Akeroyd 2008; Rönnberg et al 2008; Besser et al 2013; Rönnberg et al 2013; Kim et al 2020), the inconsistent interaction between working memory and NR processing was observed in explaining speech intelligibility or memory performance [see review, Souza et al (2015)]. Specifically, the literature found that listeners with larger working memory capacity tend to have better memory performance (Ng et al 2013; Ng et al 2015) but achieve worse speech intelligibility (Neher 2014).…”