Listening in aging adults: From discourse comprehension to psychoacoustics.

Older adults, with or without clinical hearing loss, have more trouble than younger people understanding speech in everyday life. These age-related difficulties in speech understanding may be attributed to changes in higher-level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or to lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated. This study describes attempts to systematically investigate sensory-cognitive interactions in controlled experimental situations. The authors looked at experimental conditions that closely approximate everyday listening, and show that older adults do indeed experience deficits in spoken language comprehension relative to younger adults in these conditions. Finally, further experiments designed to isolate more precisely the cognitive and perceptual sources of these age-related differences and how they vary with listening condition are reviewed. In large part, it was found that age-related changes in speech understanding are a consequence of auditory declines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)