Examining Older Adults’ Visual Speech BenefiEffects of Two Talking Faces With and Without Cueing: effects of two talking faces with and without cueing

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate whether older adults eence a reduced visual speech benefit when viewing multiple talking fapotentially due to increased cognitive processing demands. The current expment investigated this by presenting a talker’s auditory and visual speech get talker) and an extra talking face. Method: Twenty-four younger adults (11 women,_ageM= 23 years) and 24 oldadults (14 women, M_age = 70 years) completed a speech-perception-in-noistask across four conditions: valid cue two-talking-face, ambiguous cue two-ting-face, one-talking-face, and static-face (auditory speech only) conditions. the two-talking-face conditions, the faces had the same identity and swaplocations randomly across trials, with either valid or ambiguous cues indicathe target face location. Results: Speech recognition was superior in the valid cue condition compto the ambiguous cue condition, with this cueing effect being significsmaller in older adults. Younger adults’ performance in the valid cue condgenerally matched their one-talking-face condition performance, whereas oladults performed considerably worse in the valid cue condition. Conclusions: We suggest that this age effect was due to older adults distracted by the irrelevant talking face. This distraction account may implications for the extent that older adults get a visual speech benefit in conversations.