Hearing Acuity, Cognitive Aging, and Memory for Speech

描述(申请人提供)：老年人是美国人口中增长最快的部分，预计到2030年，65岁或以上的成年人数量将增长到7030万。在这一群体中，听力损失是第三种最常见的慢性疾病，65岁以上的成年人中约有40%-45%表现出不同程度的听力障碍，而在70岁以上的人口中，这一比例上升至83%。虽然听力和认知老化的研究都取得了长足的进步，但听力损失主要被认为是一个独立的问题。这种相互竞争的更新建立在十年来研究感觉-认知相互作用影响成年人口语理解和记忆的研究基础上。理论上和实践上都很重要的一个主要问题是，即使有轻微的听力损失，老年人必须花费在解码退化的语音信号上的感知努力也会吸引注意力资源，而这些资源本来可以用于更高水平的句子理解和对记忆中听到的内容进行编码。因此，许多老年人的记忆或理解缺陷可能有一个未意识到的感觉来源。我们提出了一项研究计划，以阐明知觉努力对口语信息的理解和记忆产生影响的机制。我们验证了一种假设，即与听力有关的敏锐性努力，以及与年龄相关的工作记忆和执行功能的变化，会导致句子和语篇处理方式的质的变化，结果可能导致理解成功或失败。本研究的成功将有助于我们在理论层面上对认知老化的理解，同时也对提高老年人的交际效果具有重要意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older adults are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, with the number of adults age 65 or older expected to grow to 70.3 million in 2030. Among this group, hearing loss is the third most prevalent chronic medical condition, with some 40-45% of adults over the age of 65 showing some degree of hearing impairment, rising to 83% in the population over the age of 70. Although considerable progress has been made in both audition and cognitive aging research, hearing loss has primarily been considered as an independent issue. This competing renewal builds on ten years of research investigating sensory-cognitive interactions as they affect spoken language comprehension and memory in adult aging. A major concern of both theoretical and practical importance is that even with a mild hearing loss, the perceptual effort older adults must expend on decoding a degraded speech signal will draw attentional resources that would otherwise be available for higher-level sentence comprehension and encoding what has been heard in memory. As such, a memory or comprehension deficit in many older adults may have an unrealized sensory origin. We propose a program of research to elucidate the mechanisms that may underlie the effect of perceptual effort on comprehension and memory for spoken information. We test a hypothesis that acuity-related listening effort, along with age-related changes in working memory and executive function, lead to a qualitative change in how sentences and discourse are processed, with results that can lead to both comprehension successes and failures. Successful outcome of this research will advance our understanding of cognitive aging at the level of theory, but also with implications for improving communicative effectiveness in older adulthood.