Effects of Audio-visual and Contextual Information on Auditory Word Recognition Performance in Normal Aging

Objectives: The present study compared performance on an auditory word recognition task with different visual, auditory, and contextual information across age groups to determine how these variables affect auditory comprehension in normal aging. Methods: We conducted an auditory word recognition task with 20 normal adults from each of the following age groups: young, middle-aged, old, and elderly, and compared their correct response scores and analyzed their error responses. We also conducted a correlation analysis between the score of auditory comprehension in Reading Diagnostic Assessment, RDA and the performance of the auditory word recognition task. Results: There was a significant between-group main effect, as well as within-group main effects of auditory and contextual information, and interaction effects between auditory information and group, contextual information and group, and auditory information and contextual information. The old and elderly groups made more errors in the following order of error types: unrelated errors, formal errors, mixed errors, and semantic errors; and there were no significant differences in error patterns between the two groups. There was a significant positive correlation between the RDA and the auditory word recognition task. Conclusion: This study confirms that auditory word recognition performance declines with aging in normal adults, and that difficulties may be more pronounced under certain conditions, such as noise and low contextual sentences.