Online training that helps people recognize and understand new voices could be key to helping older adults improve communication in everyday environments, finds research by UCL experts.

The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, tested whether learned voices were easier to understand than unfamiliar voices in 20 older (55-73 years) and 20 younger (18-34 years) adults.

Participants took part in some preparatory online training, where they were trained to understand three new voices by listening to them each say 10 meaningful sentences until they became “familiar”.

They then had to listen to one of these voices speak at the same time as two new “unfamiliar” voices (similar to in a social setting) to see if they could pick out a specific sentence and name which of the three “familiar” speakers they were listening to.

Participants completed this exercise 468 times each and the target “familiar” voice changed throughout the trial.

The researchers found that there was around a 30% improvement in understanding sentences spoken by new voices that participants had been trained to recognise, in both older and younger adults.

People often face the challenge of understanding speech in noisy environments: imagine a festive office party, a family gathering, or trying to hold a conversation in a busy café. This process becomes more challenging as people age.

Yet, in these environments, we are better at understanding people who are familiar to us, such as our family members, friends and colleagues.

In this paper we found people get as much benefit from being trained to understand newly familiarised voices, as for naturally familiar voices such as family members.”

Dr. Emma Holmes, Lead Author, UCL Psychology & Language Sciences

Participants were able to complete the training on a computer in the comfort of their own homes and effective results were seen in less than one hour.

Based on their findings, the team believes that if a person practices listening to voices that they regularly encounter, it could improve their everyday communication.

Dr Holmes added: “This type of training may be particularly appealing to older adults, given that people often find it increasingly difficult to understand speech in noisy places as they age.”

The researchers now aim to personalize the training to voices that participants regularly encounter in their daily lives.

Eventually, after technical development, they hope the training will be publicly available via a smartphone app.

They also hope to explore how this type of training could help people who have hearing loss, who often find it difficult to communicate in noisy places.

The researchers recently published another study, funded by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, on how people focus on a voice of interest amid multiple conversations. They found that both younger adults and older adults with excellent hearing use the location of the voice to understand speech. However, this ability decreases with age-related hearing loss.

Interestingly, this decline occurs even when the hearing loss is below the clinical diagnosis threshold. This suggests that changes in both peripheral and central auditory processes begin before clinical hearing loss is diagnosed, explaining why people with hearing loss struggle in noisy environments.

The new research was funded by Wellcome and the Experimental Psychology Society.