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Adaptation to fast speech is sensitive to hearing and hearing-aid use
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Karen Banai1, Limor Lavie1; 1Uniersity of Haifa, Israel
Even brief exposure to degraded speech can yield rapid improvements in recognition accuracy in listeners with typical hearing. Despite substantial research, the mechanisms underlying this adaptation remain unclear. For time-compressed speech, adaptation-induced gains in speech recognition were shown to persist over time, suggesting involvement of perceptual learning processes. We investigated adaptation to time-compressed speech in relation to age, hearing status, and hearing aid experience. In this presentation we will focus on three key patterns: (1) Older adults with even mild hearing loss exhibit poorer recognition of time-compressed speech and slower adaptation compared to young adults with typical hearing. This difference persists despite testing older adults with properly fitted hearing aids and using slower speech rates to match baseline recognition. (2) In new hearing aid users, amplification provides minimal benefit for adaptation processes. (3) After six months of hearing aid use, however, these same listeners demonstrate enhanced adaptation during aided versus unaided testing, though neither adaptation rate nor overall recognition reached the level of younger adults with typical hearing. Similar patterns were observed for natural-fast speech, although with greater variability. Together, these findings suggest that speech adaptation mechanisms are influenced by long-term auditory experience and hearing status, beyond their known sensitivity to acoustic properties of speech.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Disorders: Acquired