Füllgrabe Christian, Rosen Stuart
MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Science Road, NG7 2RD, Nottingham, UK.
UCL Speech, Hearing & Phonetic Sciences, 2 Wakefield Street, WC1N 2PF, London, UK.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2016;894:29-36. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-25474-6_4.
With the advent of cognitive hearing science, increased attention has been given to individual differences in cognitive functioning and their explanatory power in accounting for inter-listener variability in understanding speech in noise (SiN). The psychological construct that has received most interest is working memory (WM), representing the ability to simultaneously store and process information. Common lore and theoretical models assume that WM-based processes subtend speech processing in adverse perceptual conditions, such as those associated with hearing loss or background noise. Empirical evidence confirms the association between WM capacity (WMC) and SiN identification in older hearing-impaired listeners. To assess whether WMC also plays a role when listeners without hearing loss process speech in acoustically adverse conditions, we surveyed published and unpublished studies in which the Reading-Span test (a widely used measure of WMC) was administered in conjunction with a measure of SiN identification. The survey revealed little or no evidence for an association between WMC and SiN performance. We also analysed new data from 132 normal-hearing participants sampled from across the adult lifespan (18-91 years), for a relationship between Reading-Span scores and identification of matrix sentences in noise. Performance on both tasks declined with age, and correlated weakly even after controlling for the effects of age and audibility (r = 0.39, p ≤ 0.001, one-tailed). However, separate analyses for different age groups revealed that the correlation was only significant for middle-aged and older groups but not for the young (< 40 years) participants.
随着认知听力科学的出现，人们越来越关注认知功能的个体差异及其在解释听众在噪声中理解语音（SiN）的个体间变异性方面的解释力。最受关注的心理结构是工作记忆（WM），它代表了同时存储和处理信息的能力。普遍的观点和理论模型认为，基于WM的过程在不利的感知条件下支撑着语音处理，比如与听力损失或背景噪声相关的条件。实证证据证实了老年听力受损听众的WM容量（WMC）与SiN识别之间的关联。为了评估在没有听力损失的听众在声学不利条件下处理语音时WMC是否也起作用，我们调查了已发表和未发表的研究，这些研究中同时进行了阅读广度测试（一种广泛使用的WMC测量方法）和SiN识别测量。调查结果显示，几乎没有证据表明WMC与SiN表现之间存在关联。我们还分析了从成年期（18 - 91岁）抽样的132名听力正常参与者的新数据，以研究阅读广度分数与噪声中矩阵句子识别之间的关系。两项任务的表现都随年龄下降，即使在控制了年龄和可听度的影响后，相关性也很弱（r = 0.39，p ≤ 0.001，单尾）。然而，对不同年龄组的单独分析显示，这种相关性仅在中年和老年组中显著，而在年轻（< 40岁）参与者中不显著。
