Age-related hearing loss is an increasing challenge in our aging society, often manifesting as speech-comprehension challenges in the presence of background noise long before hearing loss is diagnosed. Challenges with speech comprehension increases the risk for social isolation and dementia. The work in our lab is concerned with characterizing the mechanisms and physiological indicators of speech-comprehension challenges, developing new approaches to better assess speech-comprehension challenges, and understanding the lived experiences and consequences of speech-comprehension challenges. We tackle these research foci from different perspectives ranging from mechanistic neurophysiology to qualitative interviews.
In this talk, I will provide snapshots of this work. I will show data about age-related differences in the acoustic encoding of naturalistic speech under different degrees of background noise that support the idea that hearing loss is a dysfunction of the entire auditory system. I will further highlight two of our recent efforts to better assess speech-comprehension challenges and associated listening effort: a novel way to assess effortful listening through eye movements and a new, automated, and language-agnostic approach to speech-comprehension assessments using artificial intelligence. I will make the case that traditional approaches using disconnected sentences can misestimate relevant age-differences that are present in naturalistic, story-like speech. Finally, I will showcase recent work that is concerned with the increasingly known link between hearing challenges and cognitive decline/dementia. I will present data on how much older people from communities across Canada know about this link and how it affects them.