Speech communication in older adults: an acoustic and perceptual investigation

老年人的语言交流可能很困难，这是由于年龄相关的听力损失的综合影响，这在65岁以上很常见，与年龄相关的发声和语音清晰度质量下降，以及认知问题，如短期记忆和处理速度较差。过去对老年人如何感知和产生语音的研究倾向于使用受控材料（如阅读单词或句子）独立考虑这些能力。这些研究很少告诉我们老年人在使用言语进行交际时是如何发挥作用的，以及这些因素是如何相互作用的。例如，它已被证明，老年人受益于看到他们的对话者在对话中，但视听语音的地方更大的要求，认知处理比听觉语音，导致增加听者的努力和减少信息回忆。在我们的项目中，我们建议获得一个全面的考虑老年人的言语生产和感知的情况下，涉及与另一个人的沟通。将包括与年龄相关的听力损失的成年人和听力正常的老年人的罕见群体以及年轻的成年人对照。在研究1中，在阅读句子或完成解决问题的任务时，与另一个说话者进行交流，要么是在良好的听力条件下，两个说话者都能正常听到对方，要么是在不利的条件下，参与者必须将他们的信息传达给另一个有模拟听力损失的说话者，或者当两个人都在嘈杂的背景下说话时。这些比较将使我们能够了解老年人能够在多大程度上调整他们的语言以克服困难的听力条件，这是一项在日常生活中语言交流中至关重要的技能。我们将获得参与者讲话的高质量数字录音，但也将通过放置在颈部的传感器记录有关他们声带振动的信息，这决定了他们的声音质量。视频记录也将被分析，以调查老年人是否利用眼睛凝视和头部姿势来表示话语的各个方面，如话轮转换和反向引导（例如，说“好”来表示理解），与年轻人的程度相同。在研究2中，听力正常和受损的老年和年轻听众将在良好和不良的听力条件下，由所有扬声器组在研究1中记录的一些句子材料。测试将在单独和视听条件下进行。将进行清晰度测试，以了解年龄、听力状况和视觉线索对言语理解的影响，并观察老年人为对抗不良沟通条件的影响而做出的“清晰言语”调整是否与年轻人的效果相同。还将进行句子回忆测试，以调查听力努力是否会减少听“清晰的演讲”。该项目将导致更好地了解老龄化对语音沟通的影响，以及“健康老年人”人群中潜在语音沟通退化的各种因素。这些基准将用于实践者，如言语和语言治疗师和听力学家谁的工作方面的沟通与老年人谁有健康并发症。更好地了解老年人在交流方面遇到的困难以及他们克服这些困难的战略，也将有助于社会工作者和护理专业人员等专业人员提高老年人的生活质量，以及开发用于远程医疗和远程监测的语音技术设备。重要的是，这项研究还将有助于我们对整个生命周期中的言语感知和生产发展的基本理解。

Speech communication can be difficult for older people, due to the combined effects of age-related hearing loss, which is common over the age of 65, age-related decline in the quality of phonation and speech articulation, and cognitive problems such as poorer short-term memory and processing speed. Past studies of how older individuals perceive and produce speech sounds have tended to consider these abilities independently of each other using controlled materials, such as read words or sentences. These studies tell us little about how older speakers function when using speech for communicative purposes, and how these various factors interact. For example, it has been shown that older people benefit from seeing their interlocutor in conversations, but audiovisual speech places greater demands on cognitive processing than auditory speech which leads to increased listener effort and reduced information recall. In our project, we propose to gain a comprehensive account of older people's speech production and perception in situations involving communication with another individual. Adults with age-related hearing loss and the rarer group of older adults with normal hearing will be included as well as younger adult controls. In Study 1, communication with another speaker, while reading sentences or completing a problem-solving task, will either be in good listening conditions, where both speakers hear each other normally, or in adverse conditions, where the participant has to get their message across to another speaker who has a simulated hearing loss or when both are speaking in a noisy background. These comparisons will enable us to get a sense of the degree to which an older person is able to adapt their speech to overcome difficult listening conditions, a skill which is of paramount importance in speech communication in everyday life. We will obtain high-quality digital recordings of the participants' speech but will also, via sensors placed on the neck, record information about their vocal fold vibration, which determines the quality of their voice. Video recordings will also be analysed to investigate whether older speakers make use of eye gaze and head gestures to signal aspects of discourse such as turn-taking and back-channelling (e.g., saying 'okay' to signal understanding), to the same degree as younger speakers. In Study 2, older and younger listeners with normal and impaired hearing will be presented some of the sentence materials recorded in Study 1 by all speaker groups in good and adverse listening conditions. Tests will be presented in both auditory-alone and audiovisual conditions. Intelligibility tests will be run to see what impact age, hearing status and visual cues have on speech understanding and to see whether the 'clear speech' adaptations made by older speakers to counter the effects of poor communication conditions gives the same benefit to that of younger speakers. Sentence recall tests will also be run to investigate whether the listening effort is reduced listening to 'clear speech'. This project will lead to a better understanding of the effects of ageing on speech communication and of the various contributing factors to potentially degraded speech communication in a population of 'healthy aged' individuals. These benchmarks will be of use for practitioners such as speech and language therapists and audiologists who work on aspects of communication with older people who have health complications. A better understanding of communication difficulties that older individuals experience and of their strategies to overcome these difficulties will also assist professionals such as social workers and care professionals who work to improve quality of life for older people, as well as developers of speech technology devices for telemedicine and remote monitoring. Importantly, this research will also contribute to our basic understanding of speech perception and production development across the lifespan.