How Individual Differences in Cue Weighting Influence the Link Between Memory and Speech in Noise Perception

Listening to speech is challenging, particularly when there is background noise or ambiguities in the speech signal. Numerous factors impact our ability to understand speech, including age, cognitive processes, and contextual information. But how do we account for these challenges? The types of cues we use may aid us in perceiving ambiguities in speech. Some individuals may rely on semantic cues (higher-level cues), such as how words relate to each other, or they may rely on acoustic-phonetic cues (lower-level cues), such as the durational information in the speech signal itself. But why do individuals differ in the types of cues they rely on? To test this, 60 older adults and 61 younger adults completed a test of speech in noise, a test of working memory, and a cue use task. Individuals who use lower-level cues (including sentence rate and vowel length) scored better on the test of speech in noise than those who use semantic cues. Individuals who use semantic cues had more of a difference in scores on the high versus low predictability sentences on the test of speech in noise. No significant relationship between cue weighting and working memory was found. Overall, these findings suggest that individuals differ in the types of cues they use to aid them in speech perception, and this cue weighting relates to meaningful differences in the real-world perception of challenging speech.