Working Memory Affects Older Adults’ Use of Context in Spoken-Word Recognition

Abstract

Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners' ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults' ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners' verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners' immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.

Effects of Word Frequency and Transitional Probability on Word Reading Durations of Younger and Older Speakers

“…Increasing facilitation in ease or speed of lexical access is thereby naturally restricted. These results suggest therefore that age does not impact local probability effects as much as conceptual and semantic prediction (as e.g., in Janse & Jesse, 2014). Effects of TP may thus differ from higher-level semantic prediction or inference as frequently measured by cloze or sentence completion tasks (e.g., Hahn, 2012;McDonald & Shillcock, 2003a, 2003bSmith & Levy, 2011;but cf.…”

What do verbal fluency tasks measure? Predictors of verbal fluency performance in older adults

“…Their vocabulary was tested in a different session, in the context of another study (Janse and Adank, 2012; Scharenborg and Janse, 2013; Janse and Jesse, 2014). All participants provided informed consent before the experiment and their data were analyzed anonymously.…”

“…The proportion of correct items (out of 60) was used to index participants' vocabulary knowledge. This vocabulary test has not been standardized, but scores have been shown to predict general listening performance (Janse and Jesse, 2014) and adaptation to a foreign-sounding artificial accent (Janse and Adank, 2012). Furthermore, as part of a general Linguistic Knowledge construct, the scores have been shown to be the most important predictor of text comprehension in both native and non-native listeners (Andringa et al, 2012).…”

The intelligibility of interrupted and temporally altered speech: Effects of context, age, and hearing loss

“…Similarly, in older normal-hearing (ONH) and older hearingimpaired (OHI) adults, intelligibility declines with an increase in speech rate whether through natural speaker adjustments or signal processing (Janse, 2009). A number of studies have consistently demonstrated that the difficulty of ONH and OHI adults in the perception of fast natural or time-compressed speech is associated with higher-order cognitive factors such as working-memory capacity, processing speed and attention, factors that are also known to decline with age (Pichora-Fuller and Souza, 2003;Schneider et al, 2005;Gordon-Salant et al, 2007, R€ onnberg et al, 2013Janse and Jesse, 2014).…”