A new form of brain training for improving listening.
The festive period and new year are often about meeting new people at events and parties – often in noisy situations.
If you or a loved one live with hearing loss, understanding what those people are saying to you – particularly if they’re not familiar to you – can be a struggle. But a new study from researchers at University College London (UCL) suggests that practising listening to voices of people you regularly encounter could improve your communication in everyday environments.
A new form of brain training
The UCL study tested whether learned voices were easier to understand than unfamiliar voices in 20 older (55-73 years) and 20 younger (18-34 years) adults. The researchers asked participants to take part in online training where they were trained to understand and become familiar with three new voices before attempting to pick these voices out amongst completely unfamiliar ones.
The researchers found in both older and younger adults that there was around a 30% improvement in understanding sentences spoken by new voices that participants had been trained to recognise. The results were seen in less than an hour.
A strategy for understanding speak in noise
Lead author, Dr Emma Holmes says, “People often face the challenge of understanding speech in noisy environments and this process becomes more challenging as we age. But in these environments, we are better at understanding people who are familiar to us.
“We found people get as much benefit from being trained to understand newly familiarised voices, as for naturally familiar voices (such as family members). So this type of training may be particularly appealing to older adults who often find it harder to understand speech in noisy places as they age.”
