Contributions of Voice Expectations to Talker Selection in Younger and Older Adults With Normal Hearing.
William J Bologna, Jayne B Ahlstrom, Judy R Dubno
PMID 32372720WHAT IT FOUND
When a talker's voice cue shifted toward the competing talker, listeners recognized fewer target keywords and more words from the wrong voice.
Older adults recognized fewer keywords overall, but the misleading cue hurt both age groups similarly.
Key findings
01Shifting the cue phrase's voice characteristics toward the competing talker made listeners recognize fewer target keywords and more words from the competing talker.
02The shift was most disruptive for male targets: target keyword recognition fell from 73.3% to 38.2% as the cue shifted from 3.0 to 4.0 semitones, and words from the competing talker rose from 3.6% to 22.8%.
03Older adults recognized fewer target keywords than younger adults overall, but the misleading voice cue caused a similar decline in both age groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study tested 20 younger and 20 older adults with normal or near-normal hearing, so it does not show what happens in patients with hearing loss or in real conversations. The task was a laboratory two-talker sentence recognition test, not a clinical treatment or diagnostic test. Target and competing talkers were always opposite sex, so poorer performance for male targets may reflect masking by a female competing voice rather than the target voice alone. Older participants were selected for normal cognitive functioning and similar education, so findings may not apply to patients with cognitive impairment. The study did not test whether voice expectations cause everyday communication difficulty; it only manipulated a short cue phrase before a sentence mixture.
Declared interests
Funded by the American Academy of Audiology, the National Center for Research Resources, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The supplied text does not report other author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that older adults have a specific attention problem with unexpected voices. The misleading voice cue affected younger and older adults similarly, and the participants had normal or near-normal hearing, so the result does not explain everyday listening difficulties in patients with hearing loss.