Online training designed to help individuals recognize and comprehend new voices may play a crucial role in enhancing communication for older adults in daily settings, according to a study.
Recent research by UCL experts suggests that online training aimed at helping individuals recognize and understand new voices could significantly aid older adults in improving their communication in everyday contexts.
The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, investigated whether voices that participants learned to recognize were easier to understand than those they had not heard before, involving 20 older adults (ages 55-73) and 20 younger adults (ages 18-34).
Participants first engaged in an online training session, during which they listened to three new voices, each articulating ten meaningful sentences, until they became “familiar” with them.
Following this training, participants listened to one of these familiar voices alongside two unfamiliar ones, resembling a typical social setting, to determine if they could identify a specific sentence and recognize which of the three voices they had already learned.
Each participant performed this task 468 times, with the target familiar voice varying throughout the exercise.
The findings indicated a roughly 30% improvement in the participants’ ability to understand sentences spoken by new voices they had been trained to recognize, regardless of their age group.
Dr. Emma Holmes, the lead author from UCL Psychology & Language Sciences, stated: “People frequently struggle to understand speech when there is background noise, like at a festive office gathering, a family reunion, or while trying to converse in a bustling café. This issue becomes more pronounced as individuals get older.”
“Nevertheless, we tend to grasp speech better from individuals we are familiar with, such as family, friends, and coworkers, in these noisy situations.
“Our research findings indicate that individuals can derive similar advantages from training to comprehend newly familiarized voices, as they do with voices they naturally know, like those of family members.”
Participants could conveniently complete the training at home on their computers, and noticeable results were evident in under an hour.
Given their findings, the research team believes that practicing listening to frequently encountered voices may lead to improved communication in everyday life.
Dr. Holmes noted: “This training approach could be especially attractive to older adults, as understanding speech in noisy environments becomes increasingly challenging with age.”
The researchers are looking to tailor the training to the specific voices participants hear regularly in their daily routines.
Ultimately, after further technical development, they aspire to make this training accessible through a smartphone application.
The team also intends to investigate how such training could assist individuals with hearing loss, who often struggle with communication in noisy environments.
Additionally, they recently published another study, supported by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, focusing on how individuals concentrate on a desired voice amidst multiple discussions. They discovered that both younger adults and older adults with good hearing use voice location aids to understand speech. However, this ability diminishes with hearing loss associated with aging.
Notably, this decline occurs even when the hearing loss is not classified as clinically significant. This indicates that alterations in both peripheral and central auditory functions may begin prior to the diagnosis of hearing loss, which helps explain why individuals with hearing loss face challenges in noisy settings.
This latest research received funding from Wellcome and the Experimental Psychology Society.
