Study found that people aged 18-30 and 65-85 with normal hearing—and hearing impairment—could all be trained to boost their ability to differentiate subtle changes in the speed, or “rate,” of sounds, improving the understanding speech in noisy environments
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r/scienceu/giuliomagnifico (16894)

Comments (332)

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What happened to the 30-65 range?

Likely they only studied the 2 groups mentioned so they can't and didn't say anything about the middle group.

Looking at what they say about the sample from the original article this is correct:

"We recruited 301 listeners for a double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial and determined if they met the following age and audiometric criteria for these groups: young normal hearing (YNH, age 18–30 years), older normal hearing (ONH, age 65–85 years), and older hearing impaired (OHI, age 68–85 years)."

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Music training seems to do the same thing, at least in older adults: Zendel, B. R., West, G. L., Belleville, S., & Peretz, I. (2019). Musical training improves the ability to understand speech-in-noise in older adults. Neurobiology of Aging, 81, 102-115.

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For the training, participants in the 40-person experimental group compared multiple series of rapid tones (think beeps or clicks) in nine sessions over three weeks. Compared to members of the 37-person control group, who were asked to detect a single tone in , those in the experimental group showed overall improvement.

So did it have any practical effect in real life?

Can the rest of us do this training to improve our understanding of speech in noisy environments?

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It may be something like auditory processing disorder where the brain doesn't process the sounds correctly even if your hearing itself is fine. It's more common among people with ADHD, autism, etc. There are different strategies (and also things like microphones and headsets) for making things easier as well as hearing therapy to work on the ability to understand sounds. Unfortunately a lot of the information is geared towards kids but there is testing for adults. Here's another link with some more tips.

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I thought it wasn't new that you can get used to isolating sentences in a noisy environment.

Their main finding is that a particular type of training - perceptual training - can restore auditory processing in hearing-impaired listeners, but only if their attention ability is not impaired.

Ah, so this is not likely to be useful to those of us with ADD-associated audio processing problems?

There are several approaches to improve attention, attention process training would help.

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What were the exercises?

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Could this carry over to vision conditions like nearsightedness?

No. For several reasons, the primary one being that nearsightedness is an optical problem (photons of light not being focused correctly on the retina)

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