Aging and speech perception in complex listening environments

描述（由申请人提供）：老年人经常在不利的听力环境中沟通困难，特别是当他们必须在背景中有其他声音的情况下理解一个说话者时。目前老年人听力损失的康复主要集中在通过助听器恢复可听性。不幸的是，这在听力困难的环境中效果有限，因为语音和背景噪音都被放大了。在听者必须忽略其他说话者的干扰言论的情况下，恢复可听性不足以确保成功的沟通。这项研究的长期目标是开发评估和治疗方法，重点关注在这些情况下介导理解的感官和认知年龄相关变化。拟议中的实验旨在提供重要信息，解释为什么老年人在一个以上的谈话者面前会出现问题。在解释语言理解缺陷时，年龄相关的外周/感觉因素和年龄相关的认知变化的相对重要性，过去的研究得出了相互矛盾的结论。本提案中的研究将通过检查与听者相关的因素（特别是工作记忆、处理速度、注意力转换、抑制控制和听力损失）如何与刺激相关的因素相互作用，从而在多说话的情况下产生理解问题，从而有助于澄清这一问题。将解决两个具体目标：1)。为了理解为什么竞争性语音信号对老年听众如此具有破坏性，以及听力损失和认知过程如何影响他们应对这种干扰的能力；和2)。确定听力损失和认知功能在更现实的交流情况下对语音识别的影响程度。提出的实验使用既定的任务（例如，同步语音对语音掩蔽，努力评级）和创新技术（时间交错语音，眼动追踪，响应时间限制）来解决这些问题。将对中年和老年听众的表现进行测量，以提供有关哪些功能能力在衰老过程中较早或较晚开始下降的信息。这个项目的最终结果将是一个改进

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older adults often struggle to communicate in adverse listening situations, especially when they must understand one talker when there are other voices in the background. Current rehabilitation of older adults with hearing loss focuses primarily on restoring audibility via hearing aids. Unfortunately, this is of limited benefit in dificult listening environments because both speech and background noise are amplified. Restoring audibility is not enough to ensure successful communication in situations where listeners must ignore the distracting speech of other talkers. The long-term goal of this research is to develop evaluation and treatment methods that focus on both the sensory and cognitive age-related changes that mediate comprehension in these situations. The proposed experiments are designed to provide vital information about why older adults experience problems in the presence of more than one talker. Past research has yielded conflicting conclusions about the relative importance of age-related peripheral/sensory factors and age-related cognitive changes in explaining deficits in speech understanding. The studies in this proposal will help to clarify tis issue by examining how listener-related factors (specifically, working memory, processing speed, attention-switching, inhibitory control, and hearing loss) interact with stimulus-related factors to create problems understanding speech in multi-talker situations. Two specific aims will be addressed: 1.) To understand why competing speech signals are so disruptive for older listeners, and how hearing loss and cognitive processing affect their ability to cope with this interference; and 2.) To determine the degree to which hearing loss and cognitive function impact speech recognition in more realistic communication situations. The proposed experiments use both established tasks (e.g., simultaneous speech-on-speech masking, ratings of effort) and innovative techniques (temporally interleaved speech, eye tracking, limitations on response time) to address these questions. The performance of middle-aged as well as older listeners will be measured in order to provide information about which functional abilities begin to decline early vs. later in the aging process. The end result of this project will be an enhanced understanding of the factors that limit older adults from fully participating in conversations in everyday listening conditions. This, in turn, may drive improvements in rehabilitative protocols that incorporate treatment of both bottom-up and top-down contributors to age-related speech understanding problems.