How repetition influences speech understanding by younger, middle-aged and older adults.
Karen S Helfer, Richard L Freyman, Gabrielle R Merchant
PMID 29801416WHAT IT FOUND
Repeating a sentence helped adults understand it better in noisy speech, with gains of about 9 to 29 percentage points in words understood.
Repeating only the message, not the background talker, helped most, especially older listeners.
Key findings
01Repetition improved second-attempt speech understanding for younger, middle-aged, and older adults, with benefit ranging from approximately 9 to 29 percentage points.
02When only the target sentence was repeated, benefit was larger than when both target and masker were repeated, especially for older listeners in speech maskers.
03Cognitive measures did not appear important in explaining repetition benefit, while age and high-frequency hearing loss predicted benefit in some conditions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study measured laboratory sentence recognition, not real conversations or clinical outcomes. The sample was small, with 16 participants per age group, and one middle-aged participant's data were removed from analyses. The scoring method was changed after the authors saw ceiling effects, and only trials with first-attempt scores between 10% and 70% correct were used to estimate repetition benefit. Middle-aged and older adults could have high-frequency hearing up to 60 dB HL, but the study did not test people whose hearing loss was worse than that. The cognitive tests used did not explain individual differences, and the authors suggest the tests may not have captured the relevant abilities. The follow-up glimpse experiment used only 15 young normal-hearing listeners, so it does not show whether older adults use fresh glimpses the same way.
Declared interests
The article text does not provide a conflict-of-interest declaration. The supplied publication types indicate NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that repetition helps everyone equally. All age groups showed benefit, but older adults gained more when only the target sentence was repeated than when the background speech was repeated too, and cognitive test scores did not explain these differences.