Abstract
Successful communication and navigation in cocktail party situations depends on complex interactions among an individual’s sensory, cognitive, and social abilities. Older adults may function well in relatively ideal communication situations, but they are notorious for their difficulties understanding speech in noisy situations such as cocktail parties. However, as healthy adults age, declines in auditory and cognitive processing may be offset by compensatory gains in ability to use context and knowledge. From a practical perspective, it is important to consider the aging auditory system in multitalker situations because these are among the most challenging situations for older adults. From a theoretical perspective, studying age-related changes in auditory processing provides a special window into the relative contributions of, and interactions among sensory, cognitive, and social abilities. In the acoustical wild, younger listeners typically function better than older listeners. Experimental evidence indicates that age-related differences in simple measures such as word recognition in quiet or noise are largely due to the bottom-up effects of age-related auditory declines. These differences can often be eliminated when auditory input is adjusted to equate the performance levels of listeners on baseline measures in quiet or noise. Notably, older adults exhibit enhanced cognitive compensation, with performance on auditory tasks being facilitated by top-down use of context and knowledge. Nevertheless, age-related differences can persist when tasks are more cognitively demanding and involve discourse comprehension, memory, and attention. At an extreme, older adults with hearing loss are at greater risk for developing cognitive impairments than peers with better hearing.
Keywords
- Age-related hearing loss
- Auditory scene analysis
- Auditory spatial attention
- Auditory temporal processing
- Cognitive aging
- Cognitive compensation
- Communication ecology
- Contextual support
- Discourse comprehension
- Event-related potentials
- Listening effort
- Presbycusis
- Speech-in-noise listening
- Voice fundamental frequency
- Working memory
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
References
Abel, S. M., Krever, E. M., & Alberti, P. W. (1990). Auditory detection, discrimination and speech processing in ageing, noise-sensitive and hearing-impaired listeners. Scandinavian Audiology, 19(1), 43–54.
Alain, C. (2007). Breaking the wave: Effects of attention and learning on concurrent sound perception. Hearing Research, 229(1–2), 225–236.
Alain, C., Dyson, B. J., & Snyder, J. S. (2006). Aging and the perceptual organization of sounds: A change of scene? In M. Conn (Ed.), Handbook of models for the study of human aging (pp. 759–769). Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press.
Alain, C., McDonald, K. L., Ostroff, J. M., & Schneider, B. A. (2001). Age-related changes in detecting a mistuned harmonic. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109(5), 2211–2216.
Alain, C., McDonald, K. L., Ostroff, J. M., & Schneider, B. A. (2004). Aging: A switch from automatic to controlled processing of sounds? Psychology and Aging, 19(1), 125–133.
Alain, C., McDonald, K., & Van Roon, P. (2012). Effects of age and background noise on processing a mistuned harmonic in an otherwise periodic complex sound. Hearing Research, 283(1–2), 126–135.
Alain, C., Roye, A., & Arnott, S. A. (2013). Middle and late auditory evoked responses: What are they telling us on central auditory disorders? In G. G. Celesia (Ed.), Disorders of peripheral and central auditory processing (pp. 177–199, Vol. 10: Handbook of clinical neurophysiology). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Alain, C., & Snyder, J. S. (2008). Age-related differences in auditory evoked responses during rapid perceptual learning. Clinical Neurophysiology, 119(2), 356–366.
Alain, C., & Woods, D. L. (1999). Age-related changes in processing auditory stimuli during visual attention: Evidence for deficits in inhibitory control and sensory memory. Psychology and Aging, 14(3), 507–519.
Albers, M. W., Gilmore, G. C., Kaye, J., Murphy, C., et al. (2015). At the interface of sensory and motor dysfunctions and Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s and Dementia, 11(1), 70–98.
Anderer, P., Semlitsch, H. V., & Saletu, B. (1996). Multichannel auditory event-related brain potentials: Effects of normal aging on the scalp distribution of N1, P2, N2 and P300 latencies and amplitudes. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 99(5), 458–472.
Anderson, S., Parbery-Clark, A., White-Schwoch, T., & Kraus, N. (2012). Aging affects neural precision of speech encoding. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(41), 14156–14164.
Avivi-Reich, M., Daneman, M., & Schneider, B. A. (2014). How age and linguistic competence alter the interplay of perceptual and cognitive factors when listening to conversations in a noisy environment. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2014.00021
Avivi-Reich, M., Jakubczyk, A., Daneman, M., & Schneider, B. A. (2015). How age, linguistic status, and the nature of the auditory scene alter the manner in which listening comprehension is achieved in multitalker conversations. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, 58(5), 1570–1591.
Banh, J., Singh, G., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2012). Age affects responses on the speech, spatial, and qualities of hearing scale (SSQ) for adults with minimal audiometric loss. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 23(2), 81–91.
Ben-David, B. M., Tse, V. Y. Y., & Schneider, B. A. (2012). Does it take older adults longer than younger adults to perceptually segregate a speech target from a background masker? Hearing Research, 290(1–2), 55–63.
Bergman, M. (1980). Aging and the perception of speech. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Besser, J., Festen, J. M., Goverts, S. T., Kramer, S. E., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2015). Speech-in-speech listening on the LiSN-S test by older adults with good audiograms depends on cognition and hearing acuity at high frequencies. Ear and Hearing, 36(1), 24–41.
Bidelman, G. M., Gandour, J. T., & Krishnan, A. (2011). Musicians demonstrate experience-dependent brainstem enhancement of musical scale features within continuously gliding pitch. Neuroscience Letters, 503(3), 203–207.
Bidelman, G. M., & Krishnan, A. (2009). Neural correlates of consonance, dissonance, and the hierarchy of musical pitch in the human brainstem. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(42), 13165–13171.
Bidelman, G. M., & Krishnan, A. (2010). Effects of reverberation on brainstem representation of speech in musicians and non-musicians. Brain Research, 1355, 112–125.
Bidelman, G. M., Moreno, S., & Alain, C. (2013). Tracing the emergence of categorical speech perception in the human auditory system. NeuroImage, 79, 201–212.
Bidelman, G. M., Villafuerte, J. W., Moreno, S., & Alain, C. (2014). Age-related changes in the subcortical-cortical encoding and categorical perception of speech. Neurobiology of Aging, 35(11), 2526–2540.
Bolia, R. S., Nelson, W. T., Ericson, M. A., & Simpson, B. D. (2000). A speech corpus for multitalker communications research. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107(2), 1065–1066.
Borg, E., Bergkvist, C., Olsson, I.-S., Wikström, C., & Borg, B. (2008). Communication as an ecological system. International Journal of Audiology, 47(Suppl. 2), S131–S138.
Bregman, A. S. (1978). Auditory streaming is cumulative. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 4, 380–387.
Bronkhurst, A. W., & Plomp, R. (1988). The effect of head-induced interaural time and level differences on speech intelligibility in noise. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 83, 1508–1516.
Cameron, S., & Dillon, H. (2007). Development of the listening in spatialized noise—sentences test. Ear and Hearing, 28(2), 196–211.
Cameron, S., & Dillon, H. (2009). Listening in spatialized noise—sentences test (LiSN-S). Murten, Switzerland: Phonak Communications AG.
CHABA. (Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics and Biomechanics). (1988). Speech understanding and aging. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 83(3), 859–895.
Chang, E. F., Rieger, J. W., Johnson, K., Berger, M. S., et al. (2010). Categorical speech representation in human superior temporal gyrus. Nature Neuroscience, 13(11), 1428–1432.
Chao, L. L., & Knight, R. T. (1997). Prefrontal deficits in attention and inhibitory control with aging. Cerebral Cortex, 7(1), 63–69.
Chasteen, A., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Dupuis, K., Smith, S., & Singh, G. (2015). Do negative views of aging influence memory and auditory performance through self-perceived abilities? Psychology and Aging, 30(4), 881–893.
Craik, F. I. M., & Bialystok, E. (2006). Lifespan cognitive development: The roles of representation and control. In F. I. M. Craik & Salthouse, T. A. (Eds.), The handbook of aging and cognition (3rd ed., pp. 557–602). New York: Psychology Press.
Cruikshanks, K. J., Zhan, W., & Zhong, W. (2010). Epidemiology of age-related hearing impairment. In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 259–274). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Dubno, J. R., Ahlstrom, J. B., & Horwitz, A. R. (2002). Spectral contributions to the benefit from spatial separation of speech and noise. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45(12), 1297–1310.
Dupuis, K., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2014). Intelligibility of emotional speech in younger and older adults. Ear and Hearing, 35(6), 695–707.
Dupuis, K., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2015). Aging affects identification of vocal emotions in semantically neutral sentences. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 58(3), 1061–1076.
Dupuis, K., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Marchuk, V., Chasteen, A., et al. (2015). Effects of hearing and vision impairments on the montreal cognitive assessment. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 22(4), 413–427.
Eddins, D. A., & Hall III, J. W. (2010). Binaural processing and auditory asymmetries In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 135–166). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Ezzatian, P., Li, L., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2012). The effect of energetic and informational masking on the time-course of stream segregation: Evidence that streaming depends on vocal fine structure cues. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27(7–8), 1056–1088.
Ezzatian, P., Li, L., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2015). Delayed stream segregation in older adults: More than just informational masking. Ear and Hearing, 36(4), 482–484.
Fitzgibbons, P. J., & Gordon-Salant, S. (2001). Aging and temporal discrimination in auditory sequences. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109(6), 2955–2963.
Fitzgibbons, P. J., & Gordon-Salant, S. (2010). Behavioral studies with aging humans: Hearing sensitivity and psychoacoustics. In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 111–135). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Fitzgibbons, P. J., Gordon-Salant, S., & Barrett, J. (2007). Age-related differences in discrimination of an interval separating onsets of successive tone bursts as a function of interval duration. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 122(1), 458–466.
Freyman, R. L., Balakrishnan, U., & Helfer, K. S. (2004). Effect of number of masking talkers and auditory priming on informational masking in speech recognition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115(5I), 2246–2256.
Freyman, R. L., Helfer, K. S., McCall, D. D., & Clifton, R. K. (1999). The role of perceived spatial separation in the unmasking of speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(6), 3578–3588.
Füllgrabe, C., Moore, B. C. J., & Stone, M. A. (2014). Age-group differences in speech identification despite matched audiometrically normal hearing: Contributions from auditory temporal processing and cognition. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 6, 347.
Gates, G. A., Anderson, M. L., McCurry, S. M., Feeney, M. P., & Larson, E. B. (2011). Central auditory dysfunction as a harbinger of Alzheimer’s dementia. Archives of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, 137(4), 390–395.
Gordon-Salant, S., & Fitzgibbons, P. J. (1995). Recognition of multiply degraded speech by young and elderly listeners. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38(5), 1150–1156.
Gordon-Salant, S., Frisina, R. D., Popper, A. N., & Fay, R. R. (Eds.). (2010). The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis. New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Gordon-Salant, S., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., Fitzgibbons, P. J., & Barrett, J. (2006). Age-related differences in identification and discrimination of temporal cues in speech segments. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(4), 2455–2466.
Gordon-Salant, S., Yeni-Komshian, G. H., Fitzgibbons, P. J., & Cohen, J. (2015). Effects of age and hearing loss on recognition of unaccented and accented multisyllabic words. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(2), 884–897.
Goy, H., Pelletier, M., Coletta, M., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2013). The effects of semantic context and the type and amount of acoustical distortion on lexical decision by younger and older adults. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 56(6), 1715–1732.
Grady, C. L. (2012). The cognitive neuroscience of ageing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(7), 491–505.
Greenberg, S. (1996). Auditory processing of speech. In N. J. Lass (Ed.), Principles of experimental phonetics (pp. 362–407). St. Louis, MO: Mosby.
Greenhut-Wertz, J., & Manning, S. K. (1995). Suffix effects and intrusion errors in young and elderly subjects. Experimental Aging Research, 21(2), 173–190.
Harris, K. C., Dubno, J. R., Keren, N. I., Ahlstrom, J. B., & Eckert, M. A. (2009). Speech recognition in younger and older adults: A dependency on low-level auditory cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(19), 6078–6087.
Haubert, N., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (1999). The perception of spoken language by elderly listeners: Contribution of auditory temporal processes. Canadian Acoustics, 27(3), 96–97.
He, N., Horwitz, R., Dubno, J. R., & Mills, J. H. (1999). Psychometric functions for gap detection in noise measured from young and aged subjects. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(2), 966–978.
He, N., Mills, J. H., & Dubno, J. R. (2007). Frequency modulation detection: Effects of age, psychophysical method, and modulation waveform. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 122(1), 467–477.
Heinrich, A., De la Rosa, S., & Schneider, B. A. (2014). The role of stimulus complexity, spectral overlap, and pitch for gap-detection thresholds in young and old listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136(4), 1797–1807.
Heinrich, A., & Schneider, B. A. (2011a). The effect of presentation level on memory performance. Ear and Hearing, 32(4), 524–532.
Heinrich, A., & Schneider, B. A. (2011b). Elucidating the effects of aging on remembering perceptually distorted word-pairs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(1), 186–205.
Helfer, K. S., & Wilber, L. A. (1990). Hearing loss, aging, and speech perception in reverberation and noise. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 33(1), 149–155.
Humes, L. E. (2007). The contributions of audibility and cognitive factors to the benefit provided by amplified speech to older adults. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 18(7), 590–603.
Humes, L. E., Busey, T. A., Craig, J., & Kewley-Port, D. (2013). Are age-related changes in cognitive function driven by age-related changes in sensory processing? Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 75(3), 508–524.
Humes, L. E., & Dubno, J. R. (2010). Factors affecting speech understanding in older adults. In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. N. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 211–258). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Humes, L. E., Lee, J. H., & Coughlin, M. P. (2006). Auditory measures of selective and divided attention in young and older adults using single-talker competition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120(5), 2926–2937.
Hutka, S. A., Alain, C., Binns, M. A., & Bidelman, G. M. (2013). Age-related differences in the sequential organization of speech sounds. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(6), 4177–4187.
Iragui, V. J., Kutas, M., Mitchiner, M. R., & Hillyard, S. A. (1993). Effects of aging on event-related brain potentials and reaction times in an auditory oddball task. Psychophysiology, 30(1), 10–22.
ISO. (International Organization for Standardization). (2000). Acoustics: Statistical distribution of hearing thresholds as a function of age, ISO 7029. Geneva: International Organization of Standards.
Kiessling, J., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Gatehouse, S., Stephens, D., et al. (2003). Candidature for and delivery of audiological services: Special needs of older people. International Journal of Audiology, 42(Supp 2), S92–S101.
Krishnan, A., Bidelman, G. M., & Gandour, J. T. (2010). Neural representation of pitch salience in the human brainstem revealed by psychophysical and electrophysiological indices. Hearing Research, 268(1–2), 60–66.
Kujawa, S. G., & Liberman, M. C. (2009). Adding insult to injury: Cochlear nerve degeneration after “temporary” noise-induced hearing loss. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(45), 14077–14085.
Leung, A. W. S., He, Y., Grady, C. L., & Alain, C. (2013). Age differences in the neuroelectric adaptation to meaningful sounds. PLoS ONE, 8(7), e68892.
Li, L., Daneman, M., Qi, J., & Schneider, B. A. (2004). Does the information content of an irrelevant source differentially affect spoken word recognition in younger and older adults? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30(6), 1077–1091.
Lin, F. R., Yaffe, K., Xia, J., Xue, Q. L., et al. (2013). Hearing loss and cognitive decline in older adults. JAMA Internal Medicine, 173(4), 293–299.
Lister, J., Besing, J., & Koehnke, J. (2002). Effects of age and frequency disparity on gap discrimination. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111(6), 2793–2800.
Lister, J. J., Maxfield, N. D., Pitt, G. J., & Gonzalez, V. B. (2011). Auditory evoked response to gaps in noise: Older adults. International Journal of Audiology, 50(4), 211–225.
Lister, J., & Tarver, K. (2004). Effect of age on silent gap discrimination in synthetic speech stimuli. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47(2), 257–268.
Lopez-Poveda, E. A. (2014). Why do I hear but not understand? stochastic undersampling as a model of degraded neural encoding of speech. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 8, 348.
MacDonald, E., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2007). Intensity discrimination in noise: Effect of aging. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysicists (pp. 135–140), Tokyo.
Mills, J. H., Schmiedt, R. A., Schulte, B. A., & Dubno, J. R. (2006). Age-related hearing loss: A loss of voltage, not hair cells. Seminars in Hearing, 27(4), 228–236.
Mozolic, J. L., Hugenschmidt, C. E., Peiffer, A. M., & Laurienti, P. J. (2012). Multisensory integration and aging. In M. M. Murray & M. T. Wallace (Eds.), The neural bases of multisensory processes. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Murphy, D. R., Craik, F. I. M., Li, K., & Schneider, B. A. (2000). Comparing the effects of aging and background noise on short-term memory performance. Psychology and Aging, 15(2), 323–334.
Murphy, D. R., Daneman, M., & Schneider, B. A. (2006). Why do older adults have difficulty following conversations? Psychology and Aging, 21(1), 49–61.
Ostroff, J. M., McDonald, K. L., Schneider, B. A., & Alain, C. (2003). Aging and the processing of sound duration in human auditory cortex. Hearing Research, 181(1–2), 1–7.
Parbery-Clark, A., Strait, D. L., Anderson, S., Hittner, E., & Kraus, N. (2011). Musical experience and the aging auditory system: Implications for cognitive abilities and hearing speech in noise. PLoS ONE, 6(5), e18082.
Peelle, J. E., & Davis, M. H. (2012). Neural oscillations carry speech rhythm through to comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 320.
Phillips, D. P. (1995). Central auditory processing: A view from auditory neuroscience. American Journal of Otology, 16(3), 338–352.
Phillips, D. P., Taylor, T. L., Hall, S. E., Carr, M. M., & Mossop, J. E. (1997). Detection of silent intervals between noises activating different perceptual channels: Some properties of ‘central’ auditory gap detection. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(6), 3694–3705.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2016). How social factors may modulate auditory and cognitive functioning during listening. Ear and Hearing, 37(Suppl.), 92S–100S.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Kramer, S. E., Eckert, M., Edwards, B., et al. (2016). Consensus report on Eriksholm “Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy” workshop. Ear and Hearing, 37(Suppl.), 5S–S27.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (1992). The effect of interaural delay of the masker on masking-level differences in young and elderly listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91(4), 2129–2135.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Schneider, B. A., Benson, N. J., Hamstra, S. J., & Storzer, E. (2006). Effect of age on detection of gaps in speech and nonspeech markers varying in duration and spectral symmetry. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(2), 1143–1155.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Schneider, B. A., & Daneman, M. (1995). How young and old adults listen to and remember speech in noise. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(1), 593–608.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Schneider, B. A., MacDonald, E., Brown, S., & Pass, H. (2007). Temporal jitter disrupts speech intelligibility: A simulation of auditory aging. Hearing Research, 223(1–2), 114–121.
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Singh, G. (2006). Effects of age on auditory and cognitive processing: Implications for hearing aid fitting and audiological rehabilitation. Trends in Amplification, 10(1), 29–59.
Picton, T., Alain, C., Woods, D. L., John, M. S., et al. (1999). Intracerebral sources of human auditory-evoked potentials. Audiology and Neuro-Otology, 4(2), 64–79.
Purcell, D. W., John, S. M., Schneider, B. A., & Picton, T. W. (2004). Human temporal auditory acuity as assessed by envelope following responses. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(6), 3581–3593.
Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., & Park, D. C. (2014). How does it STAC up? Revisiting the scaffolding theory of aging and cognition. Neuropsychology Review, 24(3), 355–370.
Rogers, C. S., Jacoby, L. L., & Sommers, M. S. (2012). Frequent false hearing by older adults: The role of age differences in metacognition. Psychology and Aging, 27(1), 33–45.
Ross, B., Fujioka, T., Tremblay, K. L., & Picton, T. W. (2007). Aging in binaural hearing begins in mid-life: Evidence from cortical auditory-evoked responses to changes in interaural phase. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(42), 11172–11178.
Ross, B., Schneider, B., Snyder, J. S., & Alain, C. (2010). Biological markers of auditory gap detection in young, middle-aged, and older adults. PLoS ONE, 5(4), e10101.
Ross, B., Snyder, J. S., Aalto, M., McDonald, K. L., et al. (2009). Neural encoding of sound duration persists in older adults. NeuroImage, 47(2), 678–687.
Russo, F. A., Ives, D. T., Goy, H., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Patterson, R. D. (2012). Age-related difference in melodic pitch perception is probably mediated by temporal processing: Empirical and computational evidence. Ear and Hearing, 33(2), 177–186.
Russo, F., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2008). Tune in or tune out: Age-related differences in listening when speech is in the foreground and music is in the background. Ear and Hearing, 29, 746–760.
Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, 103(3), 403–428.
Saremi, A., & Stenfelt, S. (2013). Effect of metabolic presbyacusis on cochlear responses: A simulation approach using a physiologically-based model. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 134(4), 2833–2851.
Schmiedt, R. A. (2010). The physiology of cochlear presbycusis. In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 9–38). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Schneider, B. A., Avivi-Reich, M., & Daneman, M. (2016a). How spoken language comprehension is achieved by older listeners in difficult listening situations. Experimental Aging Research, 42(1), 40–63.
Schneider, B. A., Avivi-Reich, M., Leung, C., & Heinrich, A. (2016b). How age and linguistic competence affect memory for heard information. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 618.
Schneider, B. A., Daneman, M., Murphy, D. R., & Kwong See, S. (2000). Listening to discourse in distracting settings: The effects of aging. Psychology and Aging, 15(1), 110–125.
Schneider, B. A., & Hamstra, S. (1999). Gap detection thresholds as a function of tonal duration for younger and older listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(1), 371–380.
Schneider, B. A., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Daneman, M. (2010). The effects of senescent changes in audition and cognition on spoken language comprehension. In S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. Popper, & R. R. Fay (Eds.), The aging auditory system: Perceptual characterization and neural bases of presbycusis (pp. 167–210). New York: Springer Science + Business Media.
Schneider, B. A., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Kowalchuk, D., & Lamb, M. (1994). Gap detection and the precedence effect in young and old adults. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95(2), 980–991.
Sheldon, S., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2008). Effect of age, presentation method, and learning on identification of noise-vocoded words. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(1), 476–488.
Singh, G., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2008). The effect of age on auditory spatial attention in conditions of real and simulated spatial separation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124(2), 1294–1305.
Singh, G., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., & Schneider, B. A. (2013). Time course and cost of misdirecting auditory spatial attention in younger and older adults. Ear and Hearing, 34(6), 711–721.
Smith, S. L., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Wilson, R. H., & MacDonald, E. N. (2012). Word recognition for temporally and spectrally distorted materials: The effects of age and hearing loss. Ear and Hearing, 33(3), 349–366.
Snell, K. B., & Frisina, D. R. (2000). Relationships among age-related differences in gap detection and word recognition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107(3), 1615–1626.
Snyder, J. S., & Alain, C. (2005). Age-related changes in neural activity associated with concurrent vowel segregation. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(3), 492–499.
Souza, P. E., & Boike, K. T. (2006). Combining temporal-envelope cues across channels: Effects of age and hearing loss. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(1), 138–149.
Tremblay, K. L., Piskosz, M., & Souza, P. (2003). Effects of age and age-related hearing loss on the neural representation of speech cues. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114(7), 1332–1343.
Tye-Murray, N., Sommers, M., Spehar, B., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2010). Aging, audiovisual integration, and the principle of inverse effectiveness. Ear and Hearing, 31(5), 636–644.
Van Engen, K. J., & Peelle, J. E. (2014). Listening effort and accented speech. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 577.
Vaughan, N., Storzbach, D., & Furukawa, I. (2008). Investigation of potential cognitive tests for use with older adults in audiology clinics. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 19(7), 533–541.
Versfeld, N. J., & Dreschler, W. A. (2002). The relationship between the intelligibility of time-compressed speech and speech in noise in young and elderly listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111(1I), 401–408.
Vongpaisal, T., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2007). Effect of age on F0 difference limen and concurrent vowel identification. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(5), 1139–1156.
Walton, J. P. (2010). Timing is everything: Temporal processing deficits in the aged auditory brainstem. Hearing Research, 264(1–2), 63–69.
Wang, M., Wu, X., Li, L., & Schneider, B. A. (2011). The effects of age and interaural delay on detecting a change in interaural correlation: The role of temporal jitter. Hearing Research, 275(1–2), 139–149.
Weeks, J. C., & Hasher, L. (2014). The disruptive—and beneficial—effects of distraction on older adults’ cognitive performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 133.
Wingfield, A., Lindfield, K. C., & Goodglass, H. (2000). Effects of age and hearing sensitivity on the use of prosodic information in spoken word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43(4), 915–925.
Wingfield, A., McCoy, S. L., Peelle, J. E., Tun, P. A., & Cox, L. C. (2006). Effects of adult aging and hearing loss on comprehension of rapid speech varying in syntactic complexity. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 17(7), 487–497.
Wingfield, A., & Tun, P. A. (2007). Cognitive supports and cognitive constraints on comprehension of spoken language. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 18(7), 548–559.
Wingfield, A., Tun, P. A., Koh, C. K., & Rosen, M. J. (1999). Regaining lost time: Adult aging and the effect of time restoration on recall of time-compressed speech. Psychology and Aging, 14(3), 380–389.
Wingfield, A., Wayland, S. C., & Stine, E. A. (1992). Adult age differences in the use of prosody for syntactic parsing and recall of spoken sentences. Journals of Gerontology, 47(5), P350–P356.
Woods, D. L., & Clayworth, C. C. (1986). Age-related changes in human middle latency auditory evoked potentials. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 65(4), 297–303.
Woollacott, M., & Shumway-Cook, A. (2002). Attention and the control of posture and gait: A review of an emerging area of research. Gait Posture, 16(1), 1–14.
Yueh, B., Shapiro, N., MacLean, C. H., & Shekelle, P. G. (2003). Screening and management of adult hearing loss in primary care: Scientific review. JAMA, 289(15), 1976–1985.
Zurek, P. M. (1987). The precedence effect. In W. A. Yost & G. Gourevitch (Eds.), Directional hearing (pp. 85–105). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants to M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN 138472), to Bruce Schneider from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP-15359, TEA-1249) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-9952-13), and to Claude Alain from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP 106619).
Compliance with Ethics Requirements
M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller has no conflicts of interest.
Claude Alain has no conflicts of interest.
Bruce A. Schneider has no conflicts of interest.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pichora-Fuller, M.K., Alain, C., Schneider, B.A. (2017). Older Adults at the Cocktail Party. In: Middlebrooks, J., Simon, J., Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 60. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51662-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51662-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51660-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51662-2
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)