How the elderly process the spoken word through noise
To improve their quality of life, older adults need to communicate with their loved ones and those around them. One of the main challenges of this segment of society is the difficulty they face when trying to hear persons speaking to them. For listeners who are operating in a second language, this becomes even more difficult. Such obstacles can lead to feelings of isolation, loneliness and fear. More effective communication strategies are needed. The EU-funded OLDER LISTNERS (Listening in noise with older native and non-native speakers: The time-line for segregating speech from noise, real-time lexical processing of spoken-words, and the identification of verbal emotions) project addressed these issues. One of the research themes looked at the time needed to segregate target speech from noise. The ability of younger and older adults, native and non-native listeners, was compared using auditory maskers. One finding showed that older native listeners could use the delay of the target from a noise masker in a similar fashion as native and non-native young adults. Another theme considered the time required to separate target speech from competitors in adverse conditions. A paradigm was developed and translated into Hebrew. Participants were then asked to retain one of four spoken digits while identifying the picture that depicted the spoken word. It turned out that the ability to discriminate between the two phonologically competing alternatives was more difficult in the high-load than in the low-load condition, when words were presented in quiet. Finally, the third theme considered the role of correctly identifying emotions in speech, which includes a combination of lexical meaning and tone. This can become increasingly more challenging in older age. Hence, to assess this, listeners were presented with spoken sentences and four separate emotions. They rated each sentence on four rating scales, related to the four tested emotions. It was found that prosody and speech cannot be individually perceived without each other. Also, for younger adults the prosodic information was more dominant. The findings were used in paper presentations at conferences and for general dissemination purposes.