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Updated: May 8, 2026

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
The impact of aging and hearing status on verbal short-term memory
Clémence Verhaegen1, Fabienne Collette, Steve Majerus
1a Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behavior , University of Liège , Liège , Belgium.
Abstract:
The aim of this study is to assess the impact of hearing status on age-related decrease in verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This was done by administering a battery of verbal STM tasks to elderly and young adult participants matched for hearing thresholds, as well as to young normal-hearing control participants. The matching procedure allowed us to assess the importance of hearing loss as an explanatory factor of age-related STM decline. We observed that elderly participants and hearing-matched young participants showed equal levels of performance in all verbal STM tasks, and performed overall lower than the normal-hearing young control participants. This study provides evidence for recent theoretical accounts considering reduced hearing level as an important explanatory factor of poor auditory-verbal STM performance in older adults.
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