Predicting Audiovisual Word Recognition in Noisy Situations: Toward Precision Audiology.
Joel Myerson, Nancy Tye-Murray, Brent Spehar and 2 others
PMID 34320527WHAT IT FOUND
Age does not reduce the ability to combine hearing and seeing speech.
Older adults struggle only because their hearing or vision is worse. Predicting how well someone hears in noise depends on their single-sense scores, not their age.
Key findings
01Knowing a person's age did not improve predictions of how well they recognize words when seeing and hearing them together, once their ability to hear or see alone was accounted for.
02Bayesian analysis provided substantial evidence that age has no direct effect on audiovisual speech perception, supporting the null hypothesis that integration ability does not decline with age.
03A parabolic model based only on auditory and visual word recognition scores accurately predicted audiovisual performance, accounting for 92.8% of the variance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a new test (Lex-List) that has not yet been validated for brief clinical use. The participants were a specific subset of older adults with age-appropriate hearing and good vision, so results may not apply to those with significant sensory loss. The audiovisual stimuli were of a single talker, which may not reflect the variability of real-world communication. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot rule out that age-related changes in integration occur over time within individuals.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest. The work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD).
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that older adults have a deficit in audiovisual integration. The study found that age-related difficulties in understanding speech in noise were entirely explained by declines in auditory or visual perception alone, not by a reduced ability to combine the two.