Age-related differences in inhibitory control predict audiovisual speech perception.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Speech Science

Background:

• Audiovisual (AV) speech perception integrates auditory and visual cues for enhanced understanding.
• Age-related cognitive changes may impact AV speech perception, particularly concerning lexical factors.
• Existing models of spoken word identification can be extended to the AV domain.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cognitive factors contributing to age-related differences in AV speech perception.
• To examine the role of lexical difficulty in AV word identification across age groups.
• To extend an existing spoken word identification model to the AV context.

Main Methods:

• Compared young (n=49) and older adults (n=50) on cognitive inhibition tasks and AV speech identification.
• Presented words in auditory-only, visual-only, and AV conditions.
• Varied lexical difficulty by using words with many (hard) or few (easy) competitors.

Main Results:

• Younger adults exhibited superior inhibitory abilities and AV speech identification compared to older adults.
• No correlation between inhibition and AV identification was found in young adults.
• Older adults showed a significant link between Stroop interference and AV identification of lexically hard words.

Conclusions:

• Cognitive deficits, specifically impaired inhibition, contribute to reduced AV speech perception in older adults.
• Lexical difficulty exacerbates the impact of cognitive deficits on AV speech perception in aging.
• Findings have implications for understanding speech perception in older adults and cognitive aging.