Older adults display poorer speech processing abilities than younger adults in adverse listening conditions, such as background noise. These abilities can be further compromised by speaker characteristics, such as gender, age or accent, possibly driven by the added cognitive demands on the listener combined with age-related sensory and cognitive decline. In the current study we ask if accent familiarity boosts speech recognition in noise for younger and older listeners.

Participants were fifteen younger adults (YA, 18-30 years old) and nineteen older adults (OA, 65-80 years old). All were monolingual English speakers and had resided in East London, UK, since birth. All OAs passed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (>26 out of 30). Sixteen of the OA had “normal hearing” (better-ear PTA <25 dB HL calculated across 0.25-4 kHz), and three had age-related mild hearing loss (25-35 dB HL in the better ear and typical sloping pattern at the higher frequencies). All YAs had normal hearing. Speech recognition was assessed using a speech-in-noise task, where participants listened to BKB sentences and were scored on the number of key words correctly repeated. We had 4 accent conditions: two regional and two second-language-accented (L2), with half of the accents being unfamiliar to the participants. Participants also completed the Speech Spatial Qualities of Hearing questionnaire and a language and accent experience background questionnaire.

As expected, YAs were more accurate than the OA in noise. We found a significant difference in accuracy between the regional and L2 accents in quiet — both the YA and OA showed greater accuracy for the regional accents than the L2 accents. No effect of familiarity was found in the quiet condition, likely because both regional accents were at ceiling. In noise, both groups had greatest accuracy for their familiar London accent, followed by the regional Dudley accent. This difference was significant for the YAs but not the OAs. Both groups had the lowest accuracy for the L2 accents and showed no advantage for their more familiar L2 accent. Taken together, these results suggest that regional accents might be easier to process than L2 accents in adverse listening conditions, and familiarity may boost speech recognition for YA but have limited impact for OAs. We are currently exploring the influence of listener-specific characteristics on the YAs’ and OAs’ speech recognition abilities e.g., accent experience, acoustic distance between the listener’s accent and stimuli.