Brief article Working memory predicts semantic comprehension in dichotic listening in older adults Philip J. James 1 , Saloni Krishnan, Jennifer Aydelott ⇑ Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 19 December 2013 Revised 13 May 2014 Accepted 23 May 2014 Keywords: Aging Psycholinguistics Auditory language processing Dichotic listening Working memory abstract Older adults have difficulty understanding spoken language in the presence of competing voices. Everyday social situations involving multiple simultaneous talkers may become increasingly challenging in later life due to changes in the ability to focus attention. This study examined whether individual differences in cognitive function predict older adults’ ability to access sentence-level meanings in competing speech using a dichotic priming paradigm. Older listeners showed faster responses to words that matched the meaning of spoken sentences presented to the left or right ear, relative to a neutral baseline. However, older adults were more vulnerable than younger adults to interference from competing speech when the competing signal was presented to the right ear. This pattern of performance was strongly correlated with a non-auditory working memory measure, suggesting that cognitive factors play a key role in semantic comprehension in competing speech in healthy aging. Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Understanding spoken language in competing speech is a particular challenge for older adults (Arlinger, Lunner, Lyxell, & Pichora-Fuller, 2009; Humes & Dubno, 2009; Schneider, Pichora-Fuller, & Daneman, 2010). Correlational studies indicate that pure tone hearing thresholds are the most effective predictor of speech identification perfor- mance in older listeners (Humes, 1996; Humes et al., 1994; van Rooij & Plomp, 1992). However, declines in higher-order executive functions such as working memory and inhibitory control may influence speech understanding in complex listening situations (Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, 2007; Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, & Daneman, 1995; Schneider et al., 2010; Tun, O’Kane, & Wingfield, 2002; Wingfield & Stine-Morrow, 2000; Wingfield, Tun, & McCoy, 2005). A multitalker environment such as a cocktail party is likely to place increased demands on cognitive resources, as the listener must focus attention on a single talker and interpret the relevant linguistic mes- sage while ignoring competing voices. Indeed, older adults report increased comprehension difficulty in social settings in which there are multiple talkers (Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics, and Biomechanics, 1988). Studies of dichotic listening, in which competing speech stimuli are presented simultaneously to separate auditory channels, indicate that older adults may be more vulnera- ble to interference from a secondary signal than younger adults in the identification of spoken words (Humes, Lee, & Coughlin, 2006). Further, older adults show a larger right-ear advantage (REA) than younger adults in dichotic word identification (Carter & Wilson, 2001; Roup, Wiley, & Wilson, 2006) and recall (Hommet et al., 2010), indicat- ing an increased bias in favour of the dominant auditory http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.05.014 0010-0277/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom. Tel.: +44 2076316368. E-mail address: j.aydelott@bbk.ac.uk (J. Aydelott). 1 Present address: Bournemouth University, United Kingdom. Cognition 133 (2014) 32–42 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT