Hearing Acuity, Cognitive Aging, and Memory for Speech

大约有1000万65岁以上的美国人患有听力障碍，成为第三大听力障碍人群 老年人中最普遍的慢性疾病。听力障碍不仅影响 老年人与卫生保健和社会服务提供者之间的沟通有效性，但它可以 导致从社交网络中退出、孤独和自我效能感下降。此续订 应用遵循跨学科的方法，结合认知心理学的观点， 听力学研究老年人对有意义言语的理解和记忆的特殊挑战 与年龄相关的听力损失。听力损失的主要问题是， 无法正确识别语音消息中的单词。我们还关心的是，当单词识别是 成功的，它可能是以消耗注意力资源的感知努力为代价的， 否则可用于更高级的理解和存储器操作。也就是说，即使是轻微的听力 老年人的认知能力下降可能是一个微妙但重要的原因， 性能我们的目标之一是测试这一假设，即知觉努力的背景下，温和的- 与年龄相关的中度听力损失引起的注意力资源已经有限， 通常用于更高层次的理解操作和编码记忆中听到的内容。 语言语境的有益作用机制，包括言语的贡献 韵律，可能是为了减少听到语音时的处理需求，从而减轻 听觉衰退和工作记忆衰退的影响。我们的目标是利用认知老化理论 让我们了解老年人理解和回忆口头信息的能力， 利用这些发现来帮助我们理解认知老化。这项研究的成功将 通过提供最大限度地与老年人进行口头交流的指导方针来促进公共卫生， 听力下降，并为那些希望制定测试指南的人提供数据 老年人的听力和测试助听器的有效性为更广泛的语言刺激比目前 就业。

Approximately 10 million Americans over the age of 65 suffer from hearing impairment, making it the third most prevalent chronic medical condition among older adults. Hearing impairment not only impacts communicative effectiveness between older adults and health care and social service providers, but it can lead to withdrawal from social networks, loneliness and a declining sense of self-efficacy. This renewal application follows an interdisciplinary approach combining the perspectives of cognitive psychology and audiology to study the special challenge of comprehension and memory for meaningful speech by older adults with age-related hearing loss. A primary concern is that hearing loss may not only result in the inability to correctly identify words in a speech message. Our concern is also that when word recognition is successful, it may come at the cost of perceptual effort that consumes attentional resources that might otherwise be available for higher-level comprehension and.memory operations. That is, even a mild hearing decline may be the source of subtle but significant contributions to declines in older adults' cognitive performance. Among our goals is to test the hypothesis that perceptual effort in the context of mild-to- moderate age-related hearing loss draws already limited attentional resources that older adults might ordinarily use for higher-level comprehension operations and encoding what has been heard in memory. The mechanism underlying the beneficial effects of linguistic context, to include the contribution of speech prosody, may be to reduce processing demands as the speech is being heard, with consequent mitigation of the effects of auditory declines and declines in working memory. It is our goal to use cognitive aging theory to inform our understanding of older adults' ability to comprehend and recall spoken information as well as using these findings to inform our understanding of cognitive aging. Successful outcome of this research will advance public health by providing guidelines for maximizing spoken communication with older adults who have reduced hearing acuity, as well as supplying data for those wishing to develop guidelines for testing older adults' hearing and testing hearing aid efficacy for a wider range of speech stimuli than is currently employed.