The Effects of Syntactic Complexity and Presentation Speed on Sentence Comprehension in Age-Related Hearing Loss: Using the RSVP Paradigm

Objectives: Investigate the impact of age-related hearing loss on cognitive decline and sentence comprehension. Examine how syntactic complexity and presentation speed affect sentence comprehension and explore the correlation between working memory and sentence understanding. Methods: Eighteen individuals with age-related hearing loss and eighteen in the control group participated. The set of sentences consists of a total of 40 sentences, with 20 for subject relative clauses and 20 for object relative clauses. These sentences were visually presented using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm, with each sentence displayed at a fast rate (480 msec) or a slow rate (900 msec) per phrase, respectively. The working memory task was also presented visually using the RSVP paradigm. Results: Individuals with age-related hearing loss exhibited significantly lower sentence comprehension than those with normal hearing. This may reflect a potential link between hearing loss and cognitive decline, as sentence comprehension tasks serve as important linguistic indicators for identifying cognitive impairment. The fast rate resulted in lower accuracy compared to the slow rate, indicating an association with age-related delays in information processing speed. Both groups showed a negative correlation between working memory and response time for subject-relative clauses at slower speeds. Thus, as working memory decreases, the response time becomes longer. Conclusion: Using visual presentation methods, this study confirms sentence comprehension and cognitive decline in age-related hearing loss. Furthermore, it holds significance in establishing the clinical basis for language-auditory assessment tools to facilitate the early detection of dementia resulting from age-related hearing loss.