Task difficulty alone does not explain why older listeners show the working-memory effect.

Evidence

The new data presented here suggest that WMC becomes more important with age, especially in the oldest participants. One possible explanation for this increasing cognitive involvement with age could be the accumulation of age-related deficits in liminary but also supraliminary auditory processing (e.g. sensitivity to temporal-fine-structure and temporal-envelope cues; Füllgrabe 2013 ; Füllgrabe et al. 2015 ), resulting in under-defined and degraded internal representations of the speech signal, calling for WM-based compensatory mechanisms to aid identification and comprehension. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1155 (#expands, via linked claim)

The survey revealed little or no evidence for an association between WMC and SiN performance. We also analysed new data from 132 normal-hearing participants sampled from across the adult lifespan (18–91 years), for a relationship between Reading-Span scores and identification of matrix sentences in noise. Performance on both tasks declined with age, and correlated weakly even after controlling for the effects of age and audibility (r = 0.39, p ≤ 0.001, one-tailed). However, separate analyses for different age groups revealed that the correlation was only significant for middle-aged and older groups but not for the young (< 40 years) participants. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1120 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Across studies restricting their sample to young (18–40 years) participants, the weighted average r value is 0.12, less than 2 % of the variance in SiN identification. According to a power calculation, it would require 543 participants to have an 80 % chance of detecting such a small effect with p = 0.05 (one-tailed)! — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1123 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Working memory correlates with speech-in-noise performance only in middle-aged and older normal-hearing listeners — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1120; Only mismatched speech input triggers effortful working-memory processing.; Working memory capacity explains under two percent of speech-in-noise variance in young listeners. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1123 (+3 more)

Related

• Working memory correlates with speech-in-noise performance only in middle-aged and older normal-hearing listeners (similarity 0.93)
• Only mismatched speech input triggers effortful working-memory processing. (similarity 0.92)
• Working memory compensates for degraded internal speech representations in aging. (similarity 0.91)
• Higher working-memory capacity predicts better speech-in-noise identification in hearing-impaired listeners (similarity 0.91)
• Working memory capacity explains under two percent of speech-in-noise variance in young listeners. (similarity 0.89)
• Working-memory capacity predicts speech understanding only in linguistically complex listening tasks (similarity 0.89)
• Young listeners’ working memory stays irrelevant to speech-in-noise even at very difficult signal levels (similarity 0.88)
• Age differences in working memory’s relevance may stem from differing performance levels (similarity 0.85)
• Processing-heavy working memory tasks correlate more strongly with noisy speech perception (similarity 0.85)
• The working memory link to speech-in-noise emerges only past age forty. (similarity 0.85)
• Task complexity modulates but does not explain the working-memory speech-in-noise link (similarity 0.85)
• Task variation across studies explains inconsistent cognition-speech correlations (similarity 0.84)
• Working memory compensates for degraded speech coding only when peripheral hearing deteriorates (similarity 0.84)
• Both working memory and speech-in-noise ability decline with age. (similarity 0.81)
• Hearing sensitivity alone cannot explain speech-in-noise difficulties (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Working memory correlates with speech-in-noise performance only in middle-aged and older normal-hearing listeners #qualifies (0.85) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1120
• Working memory compensates for degraded internal speech representations in aging. #expands (0.85) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1155
• Only mismatched speech input triggers effortful working-memory processing. #qualifies (0.80)
• Working memory capacity explains under two percent of speech-in-noise variance in young listeners. #qualifies (0.80) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1123
• Mixed findings about working memory and speech-in-noise stem from task-specific WM engagement #corroborates (0.80)
• Processing-heavy working memory tasks correlate more strongly with noisy speech perception #expands (0.75) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1230