Age and sentence context effects on auditory temporal processing in noise.

Area of Science:

• Auditory Neuroscience
• Speech Perception
• Psychoacoustics

Background:

• Age-related hearing loss can impact speech understanding, especially in noisy environments.
• Temporal processing, crucial for distinguishing speech sounds, may decline with age.
• Sentence context can aid speech perception by providing predictive information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how aging affects the perception of speech temporal cues (voice-onset times).
• To examine the influence of sentence context (dent-biasing, tent-biasing, neutral) on age-related temporal processing.
• To determine if contextual effects differ across age groups in noise.

Main Methods:

• Adults aged 18-81 with normal hearing performed a phonemic categorization task.
• The 'dent'/'tent' contrast with varying voice-onset times (VOTs) was used.
• Stimuli were presented in speech-shaped noise at a 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio within biased or neutral sentences.

Main Results:

• Increasing age correlated with reduced VOT processing in neutral and 'dent'-biasing contexts.
• This age-related decline in temporal cue processing was not observed in the 'tent'-biasing context.
• Sentence context significantly modulated the effect of age on temporal processing.

Conclusions:

• Age-related declines in temporal processing of speech in noise exist.
• Sentence context can significantly influence and potentially compensate for age-related deficits in auditory perception.
• These findings highlight the importance of contextual information for older adults navigating challenging listening environments.