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Comparative Study
. 2015 Jul;138(1):363-76.
doi: 10.1121/1.4923155.

Lexical influences on competing speech perception in younger, middle-aged, and older adults

Karen S Helfer  1 , Alexandra Jesse  2
Affiliations
Comparative Study

Lexical influences on competing speech perception in younger, middle-aged, and older adults

Karen S Helfer et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2015 Jul.

Abstract

The influence of lexical characteristics of words in to-be-attended and to-be-ignored speech streams was examined in a competing speech task. Older, middle-aged, and younger adults heard pairs of low-cloze probability sentences in which the frequency or neighborhood density of words was manipulated in either the target speech stream or the masking speech stream. All participants also completed a battery of cognitive measures. As expected, for all groups, target words that occur frequently or that are from sparse lexical neighborhoods were easier to recognize than words that are infrequent or from dense neighborhoods. Compared to other groups, these neighborhood density effects were largest for older adults; the frequency effect was largest for middle-aged adults. Lexical characteristics of words in the to-be-ignored speech stream also affected recognition of to-be-attended words, but only when overall performance was relatively good (that is, when younger participants listened to the speech streams at a more advantageous signal-to-noise ratio). For these listeners, to-be-ignored masker words from sparse neighborhoods interfered with recognition of target speech more than masker words from dense neighborhoods. Amount of hearing loss and cognitive abilities relating to attentional control modulated overall performance as well as the strength of lexical influences.

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Figures

FIG. 1.
FIG. 1.
Proportion of correct target recognition across listener groups as a function of manipulating frequency and neighborhood density (N) in target and masker words in listening situations with a single-talker masker.
FIG. 2.
FIG. 2.
Proportion of correct target recognition across listener groups as a function of lexical difficulty of target words in listening situations with a steady-state noise masker.
FIG. 3.
FIG. 3.
Proportion of masker responses (calculated out of all responses given) across listener groups as a function of manipulating frequency and neighborhood density (N) in target and masker words, respectively, in listening situations with a single-talker masker.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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