The Effect of Hearing Loss and Working Memory Capacity on Context Use and Reliance on Context in Older Adults.

Objectives: Older adults often complain of difficulty in communicating in noisy environments. Contextual information is considered an important cue for identifying everyday speech. To date, it has not been clear exactly how context use (CU) and reliance on context in older adults are affected by hearing status and cognitive function.

The effect of aging on context use and reliance on context in speech: A behavioral experiment with Repeat-Recall Test.

Purpose: To elucidate how aging would affect the extent of semantic context use and the reliance on semantic context measured with the Repeat-Recall Test (RRT).

Methods: A younger adult group (YA) aged between 18 and 25 and an older adult group (OA) aged between 50 and 65 were recruited. Participants from both the groups performed RRT: sentence repeat and delayed recall tasks, and subjective listening effort and noise tolerable time, under two noise types and seven signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).

Using Auditory Characteristics to Select Hearing Aid Compression Speeds for Presbycusic Patients.

Objectives: This study aimed to select the optimal hearing aid compression speeds (fast-acting and slow-acting) for presbycusic patients by using auditory characteristics including temporal modulation and speech-in-noise performance.

Methods: In total, 24 patients with unilateral or bilateral moderate sensorineural hearing loss who scored higher than 21 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test participated in this study. The electrocochleogram (ECochG) results, including summating potentials (SP) and action potentials (AP), were recorded.