Who Said That? The Effect of Hearing Ability on Following Sequential Utterances From Varying Talkers in Noise

Abstract

Many of our conversations occur in nonideal situations, from the hum of a car to the babble of a cocktail party. Additionally, in conversation, listeners are often required to switch their attention between multiple talkers, which places demands on both auditory and cognitive processes. Speech understanding in such situations appears to be particularly demanding for older adults with hearing impairment. This study examined the effects of age and hearing ability on performance in an online speech recall task. Two target sentences, spoken by the same talker or different talkers, were presented one after the other, analogous to a conversational turn switch. The first target sentence was presented in quiet, and the second target sentence was presented alongside either a noise masker (steady-state speech-shaped noise) or a speech masker (another nontarget sentence). Relative to when the target talker remained the same between sentences, listeners were less accurate at recalling information in the second target sentence when the target talker changed, particularly when the target talker for sentence one became the masker for sentence two. Listeners with poorer speech-in-noise reception thresholds were less accurate in both noise- and speech-masked trials and made more masker confusions in speech-masked trials. Furthermore, an interaction revealed that listeners with poorer speech reception thresholds had particular difficulty when the target talker remained the same. Our study replicates previous research regarding the costs of switching nonspatial attention, extending these findings to older adults with a range of hearing abilities.