SELECTED COGNITIVE-FACTORS AND SPEECH RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE AMONG YOUNG AND ELDERLY LISTENERS

The influence of selected cognitive factors on age-related changes in speech recognition was examined by measuring the effects of recall tas k, speech rate, and availability of contextual cues on recognition per formance by young and elderly listeners. Stimuli were low and high con text sentences From the R-SPIN test presented at normal and slowed spe ech rates in noise. Response modes were final word recall and sentence recall. The effects of hearing loss and age were examined by comparin g performances of young and elderly listeners with normal hearing and young and elderly listeners with hearing loss. Listeners with hearing loss performed more poorly than listeners with normal hearing in nearl y every condition. In addition, elderly listeners exhibited poorer per formance than younger listeners on the sentence recall task, but not o n the word recall task, indicating that added memory demands have a de trimental effect on elderly listeners' performance. Slowing of speech rate did not have a differential effect on performance of young and el derly listeners. All listeners performed well when stimulus contextual cues were available. Taken together, these results support the notion that the performance of elderly listeners with hearing loss is influe nced by a combination of auditory processing factors, memory demands, and speech contextual information.