Grant: Operating Grant

Older adults often find it difficult to understand speech in everyday listening situations. These difficulties could reflect age-related deterioration in hearing abilities, in cognitive abilities (e.g., memory), or both. For example, when listening to a conversation, hearing declines might cause older adults to mishear individual words more often than younger adults. This, in turn, will often cause older adults to misinterpret the intended message. Alternatively, cognitive declines may make it more difficult for older adults to integrate information coming from different conversationalists, leading to misinterpretation of what was said. Our research program is designed to determine the relative contribution of these two kinds of declines to spoken language comprehension so that appropriate steps can be taken to improve language comprehension in older adults (e.g., assistive listening devices for hearing declines; medication and/or therapies for cognitive declines). To date, we have been able to show that declines in hearing abilities rather than declines in cognitive abilities are responsible for most of the comprehension difficulties experienced by healthy older adults when they are listening to sentences, lectures, or simple two-person conversations. We now plan to investigate the relative contribution of these two factors when the speech material becomes cognitively more complex (e.g., multi-talker conversations), and when listening becomes more difficult (e.g., the background contains intelligible but irrelevant speech). In addition, because real-life conversations are usually face to face, we will be studying spoken language comprehension when the listener can both hear and see the talkers so that the results of this research will generalize more readily to real-life situations.