From acoustic encoding to higher level processing of naturalistic speech in older adulthood

Guest talk by Björn Herrmann, Rotman Research Institute, University of Toronto, Canada

will take place on Thursday, September 16th, 2024 from 11:00 to 12:00 hours in CBBM Building, Ground Floor, Seminar Room Loewi.

Host: Prof. Jonas Obleser
Institute of Psychology I

Abstract: Many adults aged 60 years or older live with some form of hearing loss, but hearing loss is often diagnosed years after speech-comprehension difficulties in noisy situations first emerge. Standard speech assessments often use simple word or sentence materials that do not predict well how people listen in real life. In this talk, I will make the case that traditional approaches using disconnected sentences can misestimate relevant age-differences that are present in naturalistic, story-like speech; show data for a novel way to assess effortful listening through eye movements during sentence and story listening in younger and older adults; present results that indicate age-related differences in the acoustic encoding of naturalistic speech under different degrees of background noise; and show that rich stories can give important insights into the neural processing of larger meaningful units of speech. Overall, the data will hopefully provide you with a rich flavor of approaches to understanding speech processing in younger and older adults.