Beyond audibility - The role of supra-threshold auditory and cognitive processing in speech perception across the adult lifespan Seminar
- Date:
- 27 October 2015
- Venue:
- To be confirmed
Event details
Anecdotal evidence and experimental investigations indicate that older people experience increased speech-perception difficulties, especially in noisy environments. Since peripheral hearing sensitivity declines with age, lower speech intelligibility can often be explained by a reduction in audibility.
However, aided speech-perception in hearing-impaired listeners frequently falls short of the performance level that would be expected based on the audibility of the speech signal. Given that many of these listeners are older, poor performance may be partly caused by age-related changes in supra-threshold auditory and/or cognitive processes that are not captured by an audiometric assessment. The presentation will discuss experimental evidence obtained from clinically normal-hearing adult listeners showing that auditory temporal processing, cognition (e.g. attention, memory), and speech-in-noise perception are indeed linked and, independently of hearing loss, decline across the adult lifespan. These findings highlight the need to take into account these audibility-unrelated factors in the prediction and rehabilitation of speech intelligibility across adulthood.
Speaker information
Christian Füllgrabe , MRC Institute of Hearing Research. After receiving his PhD in Psychology from the University of Paris (France) for the study of auditory mechanisms involved in the processing of complex temporal envelopes, I joined Brian Moore's Hearing Lab at the University of Cambridge for post-doctoral training. During this period, I was involved in research projects on auditory scene analysis, auditory temporal processing selectivity, and the potential benefits of frequency transposition and extended bandwidth in hearing aids. In 2010, I joined the MRC Institute of Hearing Research as a research scientist. My current research (funded by Action on Hearing Loss, the British Society of Audiology, and the Oticon Foundation) focuses on the role of auditory and cognitive abilities in speech-in-noise perception across the adult lifespan.