Age-Related Differences in Listening Effort During Degraded Speech Recognition.

The study tested noise-band vocoded speech, not speech in background noise, so it may not show how people listen when competing sounds are present. Older adults had age-typical hearing but poorer high-frequency thresholds than younger adults, so hearing differences may have contributed to the results. The study measured only executive control with the Flanker task, not working memory or other cognitive abilities that may affect dual-task performance. Listening effort was inferred from changes in secondary-task performance, and the authors say it is unclear whether this reflects listening effort itself or the cognitive cost of effortful listening. Younger adults showed some slowing on the visual task over the study, which may have affected baseline comparisons. Participants had age-typical hearing, so the findings may not apply to patients with hearing loss.

Do not read this as proof that older adults understand degraded speech worse than younger adults. Speech recognition was largely similar between the groups; the difference appeared as more errors on a visual task performed at the same time.