Study description:

We are looking for approximately 40 volunteers for the Action on Hearing Loss funded summer research project in which we investigate why some speakers are easier to understand than others are, and how age and hearing levels influence speech intelligibility.

We are looking to recruit monolingual Southern British English* speaking adults with and without hearing loss between the ages of 65-85 years. In this study, you are asked to visit us once for approximately 50-60 minutes. The task is to listen to English sentences played in background noise (via headphones), rate how easy it was to understand, and to repeat back what you heard. We will also do a quick hearing test. We pay £7 for your participation and for your travel costs.

You can take part if you are/have:

• Between 65 and 85 years of age.
• Monolingual (learned only English at home as a child) Southern British English speaker.
• Normal hearing or have mild age-related hearing loss (with/without hearing aids, but please see

  below). We will assess this during the study session.

• Able to visit us once for approximately 60 minutes between August 28th and September 12th

  Unfortunately, you cannot take part if you:

• Acquired multiple languages at home when child.
• Speak ‘other Englishes’ such as American, Australian, Scottish, Irish…
• Have previously taken part in the studies advertised by Outi Tuomainen/UCL
• Use hearing aids on every-day basis (occasional use, such as in theatre, social events etc, is fine

  but please note that because the study requires you to wear headphones, it cannot be conducted with hearing aids on).

  The study takes place at UCL (Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, WC1N 1PF, i.e., a walking distance from both King’s Cross and Russel Square stations). If you are interested in taking part, please contact me directly via email: l.tu.16@ucl.ac.uk

  This study is a final stage in our large 3-year ESRC funded study which aims to achieve a better understanding of the effects of ageing on speech communication and of the various contributing factors to potentially degraded speech communication in a population of ‘healthy aged’ individuals.

  I am happy to answer any questions you may have and provide you with further details should you need them!

  Best wishes,

  Lilian Tu
  Outi Tuomainen Valerie Hazan

  [* this particular language background restriction applies to this study because previous research world- wide has shown that bi- and multilingual speakers can differ from monolingual speakers in their cognitive skills (that also include working memory), and this can affect how they perform in noisy backgrounds. Furthermore, different accents (e.g. ‘other Englishes’) are differently intelligible to various speakers especially in noisy backgrounds. Because both of these variables are hard (or almost impossible) to control in an experimental setting, and both would affect our results, we can only recruit individuals from very specific linguistic backgrounds.]