Abstract

Correctly perceiving speech in a noisy environment is difficult for everyone, but particularly so for older listeners. Age-related hearing loss explains some of the difficulties. However, it cannot explain all of them as there are considerable individual differences in listening success between listeners with comparable hearing profiles. Cognition has been suggested as an additional factor to understand the observed variability. However, much of the cognitive speech perception research to date has concentrated on correlational studies between intuitively chosen cognitive tests and practically chosen speech tests. To improve our understanding of the role of cognition in speech perception we need a systematic and theory-driven approach. In my talk I will first highlight some of the gaps and inconsistencies currently existing in the literature on cognitive speech perception and will then outline ways in which we might start filling them in.

Also see https://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/100240