Receptive Vocabulary, Cognitive Flexibility, and Inhibitory Control Differentially Predict Older and Younger Adults' Success Perceiving Speech by Talkers With Dysarthria

Abstract

Although older and younger adults had equivalent performance identifying words produced by talkers with dysarthria, older adults appear to utilize more cognitive support to identify those words.

Older adults' perception of multiple speech types predicted by common cognitive factors

“…We previously found that older adults were poorer than younger adults at perceiving foreign-accented speech [3], but that there was no difference between older and younger adults when perceiving dysarthric speech [4]. The current results expand on our previous findings by suggesting that even though older adults' performance may differ across speech types, common speech perception mechanisms may be at play.…”

“…Our previous reports [3,4] indicated that older adults' perception of both accented and dysarthric speech was predicted by working memory capacity and by interactions between hearing acuity and inhibitory control. An interaction between hearing acuity and cognitive flexibility was only found for accented speech [3] whereas a main effect of cognitive flexibility and an interaction between hearing acuity and receptive vocabulary were only found in our investigation of dysarthric speech [4].…”

“…The current results expand on our previous findings by suggesting that even though older adults' performance may differ across speech types, common speech perception mechanisms may be at play. Across these three studies, then, we see evidence that these common mechanisms could be leveraged to improve speech perception in situations where older adults particularly struggle [3], or to enhance comprehension of motor speech disorders [4,6].…”

“…Naturally occurring forms of difficult-to-perceive speech include foreign-accented speech and disordered speech, such as speech by talkers with dysarthria. We recently completed two separate studies to investigate how older adults compared to younger adults when perceiving foreign-accented and dysarthric speech [3,4]. These investigations demonstrated that older adults were differentially impacted when listening to foreign-accented but not dysarthric speech and, more relevant to the current effort, that different cognitive supports were predictive of older and younger adults' difficult speech perception.…”

Functional Logistic Mixed-Effects Models for Learning Curves From Longitudinal Binary Data

“…where ϵ i (t) are error terms explaining the additional variations inπ i t ð Þ, from the smooth linear curves π i (t). Such practices are common in the current literature (Holt et al, 2018;Ingvalson et al, 2017;Moyle et al, 2007;Reetzke et al, 2018). Figure 3 shows the population-level estimate, fitting the above model to the sound-to-category data using the lme4 package in R.…”