Age Differences in the Effects of Speaking Rate on Auditory, Visual, and Auditory-Visual Speech Perception

Conclusions:
The findings demonstrate that the disproportionate difficulty that older adults have with rapid speech for auditory-only presentations can also be observed with visual-only and auditory-visual presentations. Taken together, the present analyses of age and individual differences indicate a generalized age-related decline in the ability to understand speech produced at fast speaking rates. The finding that auditory-visual speech performance was almost entirely predicted by unimodal performance across all five speaking rates has important clinical implications for auditory-visual speech perception and the ability of older adults to use visual speech information to compensate for age-related hearing loss.

Source: Ear and Hearing - April 24, 2020 Category: Audiology Tags: Research Article Source Type: research