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. 2022;90(2):749-759.
doi: 10.3233/JAD-215606.

Spoken Word Recognition in Listeners with Mild Dementia Symptoms

Katrina S McClannahan  1 , Amelia Mainardi  1 , Austin Luor  1 , Yi-Fang Chiu  2 , Mitchell S Sommers  3 , Jonathan E Peelle  1   4
Affiliations

Spoken Word Recognition in Listeners with Mild Dementia Symptoms

Katrina S McClannahan et al. J Alzheimers Dis. 2022.

Abstract

Background: Difficulty understanding speech is a common complaint of older adults. In quiet, speech perception is often assumed to be relatively automatic. However, higher-level cognitive processes play a key role in successful communication in noise. Limited cognitive resources in adults with dementia may therefore hamper word recognition.

Objective: The goal of this study was to determine the impact of mild dementia on spoken word recognition in quiet and noise.

Methods: Participants were 53-86 years with (n = 16) or without (n = 32) dementia symptoms as classified by the Clinical Dementia Rating scale. Participants performed a word identification task with two levels of word difficulty (few and many similar sounding words) in quiet and in noise at two signal-to-noise ratios, +6 and +3 dB. Our hypothesis was that listeners with mild dementia symptoms would have more difficulty with speech perception in noise under conditions that tax cognitive resources.

Results: Listeners with mild dementia symptoms had poorer task accuracy in both quiet and noise, which held after accounting for differences in age and hearing level. Notably, even in quiet, adults with dementia symptoms correctly identified words only about 80% of the time. However, word difficulty was not a factor in task performance for either group.

Conclusion: These results affirm the difficulty that listeners with mild dementia may have with spoken word recognition, both in quiet and in background noise, consistent with a role of cognitive resources in spoken word identification.

Keywords: Cognition; dementia; hearing; speech intelligibility; word processing.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Pure tone better ear air conduction thresholds for listeners with mild dementia symptoms and controls.
Individual (thin lines) and group mean (thick lines) audiograms.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Spoken word identification accuracy as a function of noise level.
Quiet is the easiest condition, followed by +6 dB SNR and then +3 dB SNR. Each dot represents an individual participant, with the condition mean shown in the filled bars (± 1 SE). See Supplemental Materials for comparison with performance with hearing loss equated groups.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Correlations of age and better ear pure tone average (PTA).
Global word identification accuracy (collapsed across SNR and lexical difficulty) for controls and participants with mild dementia symptoms as a function of Age (left) and Better Ear PTA (right).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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