Taking the Extra Listening Mile: Processing Spoken Semantic Context Is More Effortful for Older Than Young Adults.

Objectives: Older adults use semantic context to generate predictions in speech processing, compensating for aging-related sensory and cognitive changes. This study aimed to gauge aging-related changes in effort exertion related to context use.

Design: The study revisited data from Harel-Arbeli et al.

Speech recognition in noise task among children and young-adults: a pupillometry study.

Introduction: Children experience unique challenges when listening to speech in noisy environments. The present study used pupillometry, an established method for quantifying listening and cognitive effort, to detect temporal changes in pupil dilation during a speech-recognition-in-noise task among school-aged children and young adults.

Methods: Thirty school-aged children and 31 young adults listened to sentences amidst four-talker babble noise in two signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) conditions: high accuracy condition (+10 dB and  + 6 dB, for children and adults, respectively) and low accuracy condition (+5 dB and + 2 dB, for children and adults, respectively).

Sow in tears and reap in joy: Eye tracking reveals age-related differences in the cognitive cost of spoken context processing.

Older adults have been found to use context to facilitate word recognition at least as efficiently as young adults. This may pose a conundrum, as context use is based on cognitive resources that are considered to decrease with aging. The goal of this study was to shed light on this question by testing age-related differences in context use and the cognitive demands associated with it.

Age-Related Differences in the Online Processing of Spoken Semantic Context and the Effect of Semantic Competition: Evidence From Eye Gaze.

Purpose The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related to one of four images presented on a computer monitor.