Cohen Julie I, Gordon-Salant Sandra
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 May;141(5):EL470. doi: 10.1121/1.4983399.
Visual distractions are present in real-world listening environments, such as conversing in a crowded restaurant. This study examined the impact of visual distractors on younger and older adults' ability to understand auditory-visual (AV) speech in noise. AV speech stimuli were presented with one competing talker and with three different types of visual distractors. SNR thresholds for both listener groups were affected by visual distraction; the poorest performance for both groups was the AV + Video condition, and differences across groups were noted for some conditions. These findings suggest that older adults may be more susceptible to irrelevant auditory and visual competition in a real-world environment.
在现实世界的听力环境中存在视觉干扰，比如在拥挤的餐厅交谈时。本研究考察了视觉干扰因素对年轻人和老年人在噪声环境中理解视听语音能力的影响。视听语音刺激与一个竞争说话者以及三种不同类型的视觉干扰因素一起呈现。两个听众组的信噪比阈值都受到视觉干扰的影响；两组表现最差的都是视听+视频条件，并且在某些条件下注意到了组间差异。这些发现表明，在现实世界环境中，老年人可能更容易受到无关的听觉和视觉竞争的影响。
