This years's SLHS Steer Lecture will be entitled "Factors influencing speech perception in older adults" and will be presented by Prof. Sandra Gordon-Salant (Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Audiology, University of Maryland).  A reception following the lecture will be held in LYLE (3rd-floor atrium) from 1:30 PM-2:00 PM.

Abstract:  

As people age, they often experience considerable difficulty in understanding speech accurately, but there is large variability in performance. This variability derives, in part, from different listener attributes that may pre-dispose the listener to relatively good or poor performance, as well as to the talker’s speaking style and the listening environment. A framework for considering the interaction between listener, talker, and situational attributes is critical for unraveling the nature of an individual older listener’s difficulty in understanding speech. The first part of this presentation will review the relative importance of the listener’s hearing sensitivity, auditory temporal processing abilities, and cognitive capacity to speech understanding. The second part will emphasize selected research findings from speech perception studies that compare older and younger adults’ performance for understanding speech presented in different listening environments (noise, reverberation, visual distraction), as well as for different types of talkers (those who speak at a fast rate or with a foreign accent). The relative importance of hearing sensitivity, auditory temporal processing abilities, and cognitive capacity, as well as listener experience, in relation to performance for these types of challenging listening conditions will be highlighted. The presentation will culminate in a discussion of the implications of these findings for speech understanding in everyday listening situations by older people.