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I can hear clearly now the strain is gone: Hyper-articulated speech reduces the impacts of listening effort on speech processing in older adults

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jack Silcox¹ (jack.silcox@utah.edu), Sarah Woods¹, Karen Bennett¹, Sarah Ferguson¹, Brennan Payne¹; ¹University of Utah

The presence of background noise can lead to higher levels of listening effort when trying to process and remember speech. These increases in effort can lead to reduced and delayed brain responses, decreased word recognition and poorer subsequent memory for speech. In the current study, we investigated whether hyper-articulated (or clear) speech would help listeners overcome the negative impact of listening effort. To do this, we presented participants with highly constraining sentences that were accompanied by background noise to induce listening effort. Half of the sentences were presented with hyper-articulated speech and half with conversational speech (i.e., speech that is spoken in an everyday conversational manner). Sentences ended with an expected word, an unexpected word or a syntactic violation. Participants were older adults with a wide range of hearing acuity levels. Results showed that clearly articulated speech led to higher accuracy rates on a grammaticality judgment task, a larger N400 response to unexpected words, a large prediction-related frontal response to unexpected words and a robust, prediction-related N400 response to syntactic violations. Interestingly, the P600, an electrophysiological marker of integration effort was largely unaffected by clear speech. These results suggest that clearly articulated speech is a potential strategy that speakers can use to reduce listening effort effects on semantic processing in older listeners.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging