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，这使其成为全球第三大听力障碍患者 老年人中最普遍的慢性疾病。听力障碍不仅影响 老年人与医疗保健和社会服务提供者之间的沟通效率，但它可以 导致退出社交网络、孤独和自我效能感下降。此次续订 应用遵循跨学科的方法，结合了认知心理学和 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的成年人。一个主要的担忧是听力损失可能不仅会导致 不能正确识别语音信息中的单词。我们还担心的是，当单词识别 如果成功，它可能会以感知努力为代价，而这种努力可能会消耗可能 否则，可用于更高级别的理解和内存操作。也就是说，即使是轻微的听证 下降可能是老年人认知能力下降的细微但重要的原因 性能。我们的目标之一是检验这一假设，即在温和到- 与年龄相关的中度听力损失吸引的注意力资源已经有限，而老年人可能会这样做 通常用于更高级别的理解操作，并对记忆中听到的内容进行编码。 语言语境有益效果的潜在机制，包括言语的贡献 韵律，可能是在听到演讲时减少处理需求，从而缓解 听觉衰退和工作记忆衰退的影响。我们的目标是利用认知衰老理论 让我们了解老年人理解和回忆口语信息的能力以及 使用这些发现来帮助我们理解认知老化。这项研究的成功结果将 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健康 降低了听力，并为那些希望制定测试指南的人提供了数据 老年人的听力和助听器对比目前更广泛的言语刺激的效果测试 受雇的。

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.