Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract/Objectives
As people age, their ability to comprehend spoken language gradually declines, leading to a lack of confidence among elderly individuals about whether they can fully and accurately understand spoken information. This issue becomes even more pronounced in daily life, where noise interference is inevitable. Older adults may feel anxious or frustrated, and may even avoid social activities. Consequently, a large body of literature has explored the impact of aging on listening comprehension from the perspectives of perception, cognition, and sensory processing, often focusing on noise environments similar to those encountered in everyday life. However, it remains unclear whether enhancing acoustic cues can improve the listening comprehension performance of elderly individuals in noisy environments. Therefore, the goal of this study is to investigate whether enhancing acoustic cues in noisy environments can improve elderly people's listening comprehension performance.
Results/Contributions

This study explores whether the auditory processing performance of elderly individuals with normal aging is lower than that of young adults and attempts to enhance the auditory comprehension performance of older adults in noisy environments by strengthening acoustic cues. Additionally, it examines the correlation between cognitive function, auditory perceptual processing performance, and listening comprehension performance in noisy environments. The findings show that, in a mild noise environment, elderly individuals' auditory comprehension performance is significantly worse than that of young adults. However, no significant differences were found between the two groups in quiet or noisy environments. Strengthening acoustic cues had a positive effect on enhancing listening comprehension performance in noisy environments, but no significant impact was found in quiet or mildly noisy environments. Furthermore, memory, executive function, and auditory perceptual processing performance in the phoneme level of cognitive function were significantly correlated with auditory comprehension performance in noisy environments. However, the correlation between lower-level auditory processing and listening comprehension performance in noise was not significant. The results of this study indicate that cognitive function and speech processing performance decline with age, affecting older adults' listening comprehension in noisy environments. These findings provide a reference for whether strengthening acoustic cues could be a promising direction for the development of hearing aids, enabling older adults to participate in social activities with greater confidence and happiness, as well as engage in lifelong learning.

Keywords
Ageingspeech-in-noise comprehensionspeech enhancement
Contact Information
王玉賢
yh.wang@mx.nthu.edu.tw