Dramatic declines in perception of time-compressed speech and other challenging listening conditions across the lifespan: Effects of age, general cognition, and hearing

Abstract

Many older adults report social isolation. This may derive from hearing and cognitive declines, but the contribution of language processing is unclear. A critical language skill is the ability to cope with challenging listening conditions like noise, quiet speech, or time-compressed speech. We report results from an ongoing study of over 200 typically hearing adults aged 30–90. To test the ability to perceive time-compressed speech, participants heard sentences compressed to 30% of their duration and repeated them aloud. This was part of a larger battery testing cognition, language, speech perception, and patient-reported outcomes. We first asked if time-compressed speech perception declines with age. Age alone accounted for 60.2% of the variance in time-compressed speech (N = 173, p < 0.0001). For participants with hearing (PTA) and cognitive scores (N = 124), these factors accounted for 46% of the variance, and only hearing was significant (p < 0.0001). However, age predicted an additional 16.1% of the variance (p < 0.0001). Thus, age-related declines in time-compressed speech perception are not wholly the result of hearing and cognitive decline. Time-compressedspeech performance was also correlated with speech reception threshold (r = 0.570) and speech in noise (0.504), even after accounting for age and hearing (p = 0.0089, N = 117). This suggests a core ability to recognize challenging speech.