How young and old adults listen to and remember speech in noise.

“The potential effect of hearing loss on cognitive reserve is suggested by studies demonstrating that, under conditions in which auditory perception is difficult (ie, hearing loss), greater cognitive resources are dedicated to auditory perceptual processing to the detriment of other cognitive processes such as working…”

“WMC also seems to play an important role when people with normal hearing must understand language spoken in acoustically adverse conditions (for discussions see Mattys et al., 2012; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; McKellin et al., 2007).”

“…disorders and language-based learning impairments, older adults, and individuals with sensorineural hearing loss often experience excessive difficulty in suboptimal listening situations (Dubno et al. 1984; Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995; Kraus et al. 1996; Bradlow et al. 2003; Ziegler et al. 2009).”

“Although everyone experiences reduced speech perception in noise, children with auditory processing disorders and language-based learning impairments, older adults, and individuals with sensorineural hearing loss often experience excessive difficulty in suboptimal listening situations (Dubno et al. 1984; Pichora-Fulle…”

“…or the differences between high and low context sentences (e.g. Jerger et al, 1989; Frisina & Frisina, 1997; Dubno et al, 2000; Grant & Seitz, 2000; Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995; for other effects of context, see, for example, Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988; Bronkhorst et al, 2002), or whether…”

“Even when speech is understood, words or syllables that are acoustically degraded are more difficult to remember (Heinrich et al. 2008; Surprenant 1999), an effect exacerbated in older adults (Heinrich & Schneider 2011; Murphy et al. 2000; Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995).”

“1997; Bradlow & Alexander 2007), and older adults (Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995; Pichora-Fuller 2006; ShinnCunningham & Best 2008).”

“[251] Pichora-Fuller MK, Schneider BA, Daneman M.”

“…noise-induced decrements in adults’ memory for paired associates, sequences of unrelated words, sentences, or discourse, even with SNRs allowing perfect or near-perfect identification of the speech targets (Rabbitt, 1968; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Murphy et al., 2000; Ljung et al., 2009).”

“…go beyond prior studies that have used meaningful sentences to supply contextual support for word recognition for degraded words (e.g., Perry & Wingfield, 1994; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Wingfield et al., 1991) or with young and older adults with hearing loss (Gordon-Salant & Fitzgibbons, 1997).”

“In conditions of effortful listening in the presence of background babble, regardless of whether words are correctly or incorrectly perceived, they are not remembered as well as when they were heard in quiet (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Pichora-Fuller, 1996; Brown and Pichora-Fuller, 2000).”

“In addition, there is evidence that degraded peripheral representations and/or the increased processing demands caused by hearing impairment and aging interfere with the long-term storage and long-term recall of a message (McCoy et al., 2005; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“[49] found that word recognition for the auditory information was compromised as a result of reductions in signalto-noise (S/N) ratios.”

“…confirms that hearing loss is commonly accompanied by increased listening effort (Feuerstein, 1992; Hick and Tharpe, 2002; McCoy et al., 2005; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Rabbitt, 1991) and is related to greater fatigue (Edwards et al., 2007; Hick and Tharpe, 2002), even when amplification…”

“Speech perception in noise involves complex processing (i.e., both processing and storage of the incoming auditory information; Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995).”

“Previous findings using other techniques indicate that predictability influenced word identification in degraded speech (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Wingfield et al., 1991) and degraded reading (Spe-”

“Word Vocabulary Test • Ageing is associated with a larger word vocabulary (Henry et al. 2004), which may help elderly listeners to compensate for some of the speech comprehension difficulties caused by background noise or hearing loss (Wingfield et al. 1991; Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995).”

“Research exploring how we perceive degraded speech typically considers situations in which speech is the sole (or target) signal, and not how distraction may influence speech processing (Miller et al., 1951; Kalikow et al., 1977; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Davis et al., 2005).”

“…have demonstrated that degrading the peripheral auditory input can lead to poorer performance on cognitive measures (e.g., Rabbitt, 1968, 1990; Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995; Schneider and Pichora-Fuller, 2000; Wingfield et al, 2005; Surprenant, 2007), as well as clinical assessments of…”

“Semantic predictability has been shown previously to influence speech perception (Boothroyd and Nittrouer, 1988; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Stickney and Assmann, 2001), and in our study, we demonstrated that it affected accuracy of comprehension, with an improvement from 50 to 90%, when used with spectrally degraded…”

“On a more positive note, older adults derive more sensory benefit from supportive context than younger adults, suggesting that compensatory processes can help overcome some aspects of age-related sensory degradation.(57,58) Intraindividual variability also needs to be taken into account when assessing the cognitive fu…”

“…the factors that come into play at a descriptive level, such as the way older adults can effectively use linguistic context to aid word recognition (Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995; Wingfield et al. 1991) and to use the intonation pattern of speech to help identify the major clauses, or " thought…”

“words at unfavorable SNRs than young listeners and remember fewer words to recall on a memory task in these adverse listening conditions compared with more favorable conditions [42].”

“The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL; Pichora-Fuller et al., 2016) defines listening effort as the ‘‘deliberate allocation of mental resources to overcome obstacles in goal pursuit when carrying out a [listening] task’’ (p. 10 S). This definition highlights that effort arises not only as a result…”

“…tests were chosen because performance on all these tasks declines with age (Alain et al., 2001; Frisina & Frisina, 1997; Gordon-Salant et al., 2006; Grube et al., 2003; Heinrich & Schneider, 2006; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Schneider et al., 1994; Stenklev & Laukli, 2004; Strouse et al., 1998).”

“Using the SPIN-R test materials in a working memory span procedure (following Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), we tested the effect of perceptual stress on working memory span in younger and older listeners (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“Similarly, Pichora-Fuller et al. (1995) suggested that their older monolingual adults benefited more from semantic context than younger monolingual adults because the increased processing demands associated with aging forced them to use contextual information more often.”

“Thus, similar to results with A identification ( Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, & Daneman, 1995; Sommers & Danielson, 1999) and 264”

“DTT SRT was found to decline with decreasing cognitive ability, consistent with previous reports using other SiN tests [46,47].”

“Significant post-training improvements were shown for measures of attention (Stroop, 7.5 points) and working memory (Listening Span, 0.5 sentences).”

“The link between age-related limitations in working memory capacity, auditory function, and speech understanding among elderly listeners has been investigated by Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, and Daneman (1995).”

“…reduction algorithms on cognitive resources during listening to speech in noise, Sarampalis et al (2009) used a dual task paradigm, which involved repeating fi nal words of sets of spoken sentences and encoding the fi nal words into memory for subsequent recall (see Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995).”

“Specifically, working memory (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Rudner et al., 2011) and selective attention capacities (ShinnCunningham and Best, 2008; Kerlin et al., 2010) are affected by acoustic degradation.”

“…and Stine-Morrow, 2000, for a review), older adults’ difficulties with single word identification can be significantly reduced when these words are heard in a sentence context (e.g., Wingfield et al, 1991; Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995; Gordon-Salant and Fitzgibbons, 1997; Dubno et al, 2000).”

“In Experiment 1, SPIN-R sentences were presented in the same range of S:N conditions (+8, +4, 0, ¡4 dB S:N) used in a previous study of age-related diVerences in word identiWcation (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“When speech becomes less intelligible, listeners become more reliant on top–down working memory processes to infer what has been said (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“Certain populations seem to be especially vulnerable to degraded speech, such as older adults (Helfer and Freyman, 2008; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995) and individuals with learning disorders like dyslexia and specific language impairment (Ziegler et al., 2005; Ziegler et al., 2009; but see also…”

“Furthermore, there are indications that advanced age affects other higher-level processes in hearing such as auditory memory e.g., Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995 .”

“The magnitude of the difference is greater in the elderly than in the young regardless of whether the sentence is read(60) or spoken aloud.(61) It would be remiss to not point out that some age-related effects, including those involved in comprehension of the messages patients emit, might be due to declines in percept…”

“Many older adults have difficulty understanding speech, especially in the presence of background noise (Dubno et al., 1984; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Frisina and Frisina, 1997).”

“Also, in the auditory domain, Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, and Daneman (1995) showed that correlations between working memory and memory performance were higher when the to-be-remembered speech was embedded in noise.”

“Several studies have confounded age and hearing impairment by comparing young, normally-hearing adults with older, hearing-impaired adults (e.g., Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Mishra et al., 2014).”

“these words after each set of eight sentences (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“Although it has been shown that younger listeners with normal hearing do not rely as much on the context in sentences as older listeners do (Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995), it is unclear why the YNH listeners in this study made less use of context in the SIX masker condition compared with the SSN and TT conditions.”

“In sum, these studies suggest that older adults rely more on cognitive resources to interpret degraded speech signals, resulting from hearing loss thereby placing more demand on executive functions and working memory (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Pichora-fuller, 2003; Pichora-Fuller and Singh, 2006; Amichetti et al.,…”

“These results confirm previous findings (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995) that older adults, who Figure 4.”

“, 2008; Walton, 2010) to changes in higher-order executive functions (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Henry et al., 2017).”

“One sees this effect in tests in which degraded words are shown to be more perceptible when heard in a highly predictable sentence context than in a neutral context (Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995).”

“This latter factor might be especially relevant given that processing language in noise appears to be more effortful than in quiet (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Rabbitt, 1968, 1991; Tun, 1998).”

“…memory capacity decreases with age (e.g., Craik and Jennings, 1992; Van der Linden et al., 1994), it is not unreasonable to assume that a decline in working memory plays an important role in the difficulties older adults experience when understanding speech in noise (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“In the context of the information-processing models for speech (e.g., Pichora-Fuller et al. 1995; Rönnberg et al. 2008; Lunner et al. 2009; Rossi-Katz & Arehart 2009), listeners experiencing these multiple sources of signal degradation will need to allocate more processing resources to earlier…”

“For example, a sentence’s final word embedded in noise is more easily identified when it is contextually predictable than when it is unpredictable (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995).”

“Prediction and other higher level cognitive processes are thought to be especially important when the auditory signal is degraded, such as for people with hearing impairment, or for people in difficult listening conditions such as a noisy or reverberant room (Mattys et al., 2012; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995), or when…”

“It may be particularly difficult to evaluate the relative contribution of cognitive-level effects to speech-processing declines when the presentation of irrelevant material simultaneously acts as a peripheral mask, because in such situations, both sensory (information-degradation hypothesis; Pichora-Fuller et al., 199…”

“Some investigators have suggested that changes in cognitive ( Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, & Daneman, 1995 ) or central auditory processing abilities (Jerger, Jerger, Oliver, & Pirozzolo, 1989) play a limited role in the decreased recognition of speech as well.”