Older adults’ perception of medically related sentences in three listening conditions

During hospital stays, crucial information about diagnoses, treatment plans, and discharge instructions is provided. Although understanding this information is essential, several barriers to successful communication exist that may have differing impacts depending on a patient’s age. First, hospitals are noisy places, which could challenge speech understanding for older adults due to the increased incidence of hearing loss. However, older adults’ larger vocabularies may support their comprehension of infrequent or less familiar medical words. To investigate how these factors impact intelligibility for older adults, recordings of medically related sentences with different familiarity/frequency types (low/low, high/low, high/high) were presented to 79 listeners (average age = 66 years; range 60–81) for transcription in quiet, speech-shaped noise, or hospital noise. Performance was best in quiet and worst in hospital noise. Both word frequency and familiarity impacted performance. Sentences with high familiarity but low frequency had lower accuracy than those with high familiarity and frequency; sentences with low frequency and familiarity showed low accuracy, particularly in hospital noise. Thus, hospital noise may impact the understanding of essential medical information. [Work by the IU Institute for Advanced Study and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, https://doi.org/10.37717/2021-3028.]