Age, Hearing, and the Perceptual Learning of Rapid Speech.
Maayan Manheim, Limor Lavie, Karen Banai
PMID 29877142WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with or without hearing loss rapidly learned less about time-compressed speech than young adults.
Training helped all groups, but gains and transfer were smaller in older adults.
Key findings
01Early learning of time-compressed speech was weaker in older adults than in young adults, and weaker in older adults with hearing loss than in older adults with normal hearing.
02Training improved adaptive performance thresholds, but trained older adults made smaller pretest to posttest gains than trained young adults.
03Transfer was limited: training helped repeated natural-fast sentences across groups, but not new natural-fast sentences; only young adults transferred to new time-compressed sentences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Training and testing occurred on the same day, so it is unknown whether the older adults' gains were retained. The control group did not receive an active task, so training effects could partly reflect extra time spent in the study. The older participants were well-educated and had high Mini-Mental State Examination scores, so the results may not apply to all older adults. Participants had no prior or current hearing aid use, so the findings do not address people who use hearing aids. The speech material was laboratory Hebrew sentences compressed to unnatural rates, not everyday conversation. The study did not test whether hearing aids would change transfer.
Declared interests
The only declaration provided is funding from The National Institute of Psychobiology in Israel.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that this training will help older adults understand new fast speech in everyday conversation. Transfer to new time-compressed sentences was seen only in young adults, and transfer to new natural-fast sentences was absent in all groups. The study also tested only immediate posttest.