Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Age-related changes in the use of linguistic cues for speech intelligibility in adverse listening conditions

Post-doctoral Research Fellow: Dr Antje Heinrich

The project investigates how various linguistic cues aid speech intelligibility in young and old adults. The research is based on the paradoxical finding that older adults show comparable and even better performance on certain types of speech comprehension tests than their younger counterparts despite the increasing severity of their age-related hearing loss. We investigate what makes older adults such efficient users of language, and specifically what types of linguistic cues (acoustic-phonetic cues and global semantic cues) are particularly useful to them in various listening conditions. In using linguistically carefully controlled speech material we seek to disentangle the influence of fine acoustic and global semantic cues on speech comprehension in adverse sound environments in general, and how each of these cues interacts with age. The results of the project will advance our understanding of the remarkable robustness of speech perception, and further elucidate how compensation mechanisms in older adults work to overcome age-related deficiencies in one domain (hearing) with superior functioning in another domain (verbal knowledge).