Hearing Acuity, Cognitive Aging, and Memory for Speech

描述(申请人提供)：大约1000万65岁以上的美国人患有听力障碍，使其成为老年人中第三常见的慢性疾病。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，还可能导致退出社交网络、孤独和自我效能感下降。这项更新申请采用跨学科的方法，结合认知心理学和听力学的角度，研究年龄相关听力损失的老年人对有意义言语的理解和记忆的特殊挑战。一个主要的担忧是，听力损失可能不仅导致无法正确识别语音消息中的单词。我们还担心，当单词识别成功时，可能会以知觉努力为代价，消耗注意力资源，否则这些资源可能会用于更高水平的理解和记忆操作。也就是说，即使是轻微的听力下降，也可能是导致老年人认知能力下降的微妙但重要的原因。我们的目标之一是测试一种假设，即在轻度到中度年龄相关性听力损失的背景下，知觉努力吸引的注意力资源已经有限，而老年人通常可能会用于更高水平的理解操作，并对记忆中听到的内容进行编码。包括语音韵律的贡献在内的语言语境的有益影响的潜在机制可能是减少在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。我们的目标是使用认知老化理论来了解我们对老年人理解和回忆口语信息的能力，并利用这些发现来了解我们对认知老化的理解。这项研究的成功结果将通过提供最大限度地与听力下降的老年人进行口头交流的指南来促进公共健康，并为那些希望制定测试老年人听力的指南和测试助听器对比目前使用的更广泛的言语刺激的效果的人提供数据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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.