The two sides of sensory-cognitive interactions: effects of age, hearing acuity, and working memory span on sentence comprehension

eDeCaro, Renee; Peelle, Jonathan E; eGrossman, Murray; eWingfield, Arthur · 2016 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00236

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Summary

This study investigates the interaction between sensory deficits and cognitive resources in spoken sentence comprehension, specifically examining how age, hearing acuity, and working memory capacity influence performance. The research addresses the challenge that older adults face due to age-related declines in both auditory perception and cognitive processing. The authors sought to determine whether perceptual effort required for speech recognition draws on limited cognitive resources, thereby impairing comprehension of syntactically complex sentences, particularly in individuals with hearing loss. The experiment involved 72 participants divided into three groups: young adults with normal hearing, older adults with good hearing acuity, and older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Comprehension was assessed by having participants identify the gender of the agent performing an action in spoken sentences. The stimuli varied in syntactic complexity (subject-relative vs. object-relative constructions) and structural disruption (insertion of prepositional phrases to create short or long separation between the agent and the action). Sentences were presented at two sound levels: a fixed absolute level and a level adjusted for individual hearing thresholds. Working memory capacity was measured using a reading span task. The results indicated that effects of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement, and sound level were significant only for sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. For simpler subject-relative sentences, performance remained relatively stable across conditions. Working memory capacity, as measured by reading span scores, accounted for a significant amount of variance in comprehension accuracy. Crucially, once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were statistically controlled, chronological age contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy among older adults. This suggests that age-related declines in comprehension are mediated by specific sensory and cognitive factors rather than age itself. The findings support a framework in which domain-general executive resources, particularly verbal working memory, are shared between perceptual and linguistic processing. The study demonstrates that increased perceptual effort, caused by hearing impairment or acoustic degradation, competes with the cognitive resources needed for syntactic integration. This competition disproportionately affects the comprehension of complex syntactic structures. The results imply that interventions aimed at improving speech comprehension in older adults should consider both auditory rehabilitation and the preservation of working memory resources, highlighting the critical role of sensory-cognitive interactions in language processing.

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• age related perceptual decline