"Does audiovisual speech offer a fountain of youth for old ears? An event-related brain potential study of age differences in audiovisual speech perception."

The study I chose for Chapter 10 was about older and younger adults and speech perception. The study sought to identify audiovisual speech as an improver for speech perception in a noisy environment. Researchers of the study looked at event-related potentials that could possibly underlie the audiovisual speech perception. There were a total of 34 participants, 17 younger adults and 17 older adults in the study. Before beginning the study, participants were screened for intact sensory abilities. Participants were asked to perform object categorization task in three different conditions. The first was auditory only, the second was visual only, and the third was audiovisual speech. Stimuli consisted of 80 spoken words, forty were natural items and forty were manmade items. Each stimulus contained two triggers: one to mark the onset of the lip movement and the other to mark the onset of the sound, even for audio only trials where no lip-movement was apparent and for Visual only trials where no audible sound was present. Each testing condition consisted of background noise. In order to record data while testing was being done in the different conditions, participants wore and (EEG) cap containing 32 tin electrodes. The EEG was recorded continuously throughout out the testing.  Researchers analyzed the data using and ANOVA and followed with a Greenhouse-Geisser test. Older adults showed poorer sensory functioning than the younger adults in the research study. Further analyses of our data confirmed that multisensory interaction is more pronounced at an earlier time point in Older Adults than in Younger Adults.

Winneke, A. H., & Phillips, N. A. (2011). Does audiovisual speech offer a fountain of youth for old ears? An event-related brain potential study of age differences in audiovisual speech perception. Psychology and Aging, 26(2), 427-438. doi:10.1037/a0021683