Examining Older Adults' Visual Speech Benefit: Effects of Two Talking Faces With and Without Cueing

The aim of this study was to investigate whether older adults experience a reduced visual speech benefit when viewing multiple talking faces, potentially due to increased cognitive processing demands. The current experiment investigated this by presenting a talker's auditory and visual speech (target talker) and an extra talking face.

Twenty-four younger adults (11 women, M_age = 23 years) and 24 older adults (14 women, M_age = 70 years) completed a speech-perception-in-noise task across four conditions: valid cue two-talking-face, ambiguous cue two-talking-face, one-talking-face, and static-face (auditory speech only) conditions. In the two-talking-face conditions, the faces had the same identity and swapped locations randomly across trials, with either valid or ambiguous cues indicating the target face location.

Speech recognition was superior in the valid cue condition compared to the ambiguous cue condition, with this cueing effect being significantly smaller in older adults. Younger adults' performance in the valid cue condition generally matched their one-talking-face condition performance, whereas older adults performed considerably worse in the valid cue condition.

We suggest that this age effect was due to older adults being distracted by the irrelevant talking face. This distraction account may have implications for the extent that older adults get a visual speech benefit in group conversations.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29318336.