Processing speed and timing in aging adults: psychoacoustics, speech perception, and comprehension

Age-related differences are observed on many measures of both perceptual and cognitive processing. Indeed, strong correlations between basic measures of hearing and vision and age-related variations in intelligence have highlighted the powerful links between perception and cognition. In this paper, links between age-related differences in auditory temporal processing and slowing in cognitive processing are explored in an effort to illuminate how older adults listen to language spoken in challenging everyday conditions. Experiments in which the signal-to-noise condition is varied to equate listening difficulty for younger and older adults and experiments that simulate auditory aging in younger listeners provide evidence that at least some of the apparent age-related differences in cognitive performance during spoken language comprehension may be secondary to auditory temporal processing differences.