This journal self-study course is composed of papers from the 7th Aging and Speech Communication Conference (April 2019). The articles cover a range of topics about speech processing in normal aging, including changes in auditory pathways and cortical structures in older adults with and without hearing loss; the relationship between cognitive skills and hearing performance in older adults; speech perception of older and younger adults when certain linguistic factors are manipulated; and age-related effects of processing accented speech in native and non-native speakers.

Learning Outcomes
You will be able to:

• Explain auditory pathway and cortical changes seen in aging and how these changes correspond to hearing ability
• Summarize age-related performance differences in processing speech when prosodic or lexical factors are manipulated
• Describe how the relationship between cognitive functions and speech processing can potentially inform how hearing is managed in aging
• Explain how aging affects perception of foreign-accented speech in native and non-native speakers

Articles in This Course

1. Age Effects on Neural Representation and Perception of Silence Duration Cues in Speech, by Lindsey Roque, Casey Gaskins, Sandra Gordon-Salant, Matthew J. Goupell, and Samira Anderson, published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
2. Poorer Speech Reception Threshold in Noise is Associated With Lower Brain Volume in Auditory and Cognitive Processing Regions, by Mary Rudner, Mark Seeto, Gitte Keidser, Blake Johnson, and Jerker Rönnberg, published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
3. Lexical Influences on Errors in Masked Speech Perception in Younger, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults, by Alexandra Jesse and Karen S. Helfer, published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
4. Longitudinal Relationships Between Decline in Speech-in-Noise Recognition Ability and Cognitive Functioning: The Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, by Marieke Pronk, Birgit I. Lissenberg-Witte, Hilde P. A. van der Aa, Hannie C. Comijs, Cas Smits, Ulrike Lemke, Adriana A. Zekveld, and Sophia E. Kramer, published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
5. Age-Related Differences in the Perception of Emotion in Spoken Language: The Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics, by Boaz M. Ben-David, Sarah Gal-Rosenblum, Pascal H. H. M. van Lieshout, and Vered Shakuf, published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Author Information

Assessment Type

Self-assessment—Think about what you learned and report on the Completion Form how you will use your new knowledge.

To earn continuing education credit, you must complete the learning assessment by the end date below.

Articles originally published in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Content origination date: December 17, 2020
End date: December 17, 2025

This course is offered for 1.15 ASHA CEUs (Advanced level, Professional area).