title: The impact of aging and hearing status on verbal short-term memory.
abstract: The aim of this study is to assess the impact of hearing status on age-related decrease in verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This was done by administering a battery of verbal STM tasks to elderly and young adult participants matched for hearing thresholds, as well as to young normal-hearing control participants. The matching procedure allowed us to assess the importance of hearing loss as an explanatory factor of age-related STM decline. We observed that elderly participants and hearing-matched young participants showed equal levels of performance in all verbal STM tasks, and performed overall lower than the normal-hearing young control participants. This study provides evidence for recent theoretical accounts considering reduced hearing level as an important explanatory factor of poor auditory-verbal STM performance in older adults.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology: Cognition and Behavior , University of Liège , Liège , Belgium.
authors.forename: Clémence
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Verhaegen
authors.forename: Fabienne
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Collette
authors.forename: Steve
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Majerus
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology*; D006320:Hearing Tests; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D010700:Phonetics; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013998:Time Perception; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult