The Effect of Aging and Priming on Same/Different Judgments Between Text and Partially Masked Speech.
Richard L Freyman, Jenna Terpening, Angela C Costanzi and 1 others
PMID 28650352WHAT IT FOUND
Reading the sentence before hearing it made it easier to tell whether a printed sentence matched heard speech.
The benefit was smaller in older adults when background talkers were present, but not when background noise was used.
Key findings
01Seeing the caption before the sentence produced a larger caption-before benefit than seeing it after in younger adults listening to two-talker babble.
02Older adults also showed caption-before benefits, but these were smaller and less consistent across signal-to-noise ratios in two-talker babble.
03With dynamic speech noise, both groups benefited from caption-before, and the benefit did not differ consistently between age groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Participants judged nonsense sentences in a laboratory masking task, not everyday conversation, so the results do not show how captions or written previews work in real communication. Only 24 of the 56 participants completed the cognitive test battery, so the links between cognition and priming are based on a smaller subgroup. Older adults were required to have no more than a moderate hearing loss, so the results may not apply to people with more severe hearing loss. The age-group difference was found for two-talker babble but not for dynamic speech noise, and the authors state they are uncertain what aspects of aging caused the reduced priming benefit. At the lowest and highest signal-to-noise ratios, apparent lack of differences in older adults may have been influenced by floor and ceiling effects.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the caption-before benefit as proof that captions improve everyday listening. The study used nonsense sentences in a laboratory masking task, and the benefit was smaller for older adults when background speech was present.