Hospital noise often exceeds recommended values, which can negatively impact spoken communication. For example, hospital noise decreases transcription accuracy for both younger and older adults compared to quiet conditions, and older adults in particular might face additional challenges in hospital noise compared to other noise types (Bent et al., JASA, 2022). Further, memory and comprehension for speech can be impacted by noise generally, but the impact of hospital noise has not been specifically studied. In this study, we ask how hospital noise impacts discourse comprehension and memory for older adults. Participants completed four virtual medical scenarios, two in quiet and two in hospital noise, and answered a series of memory and comprehension questions. Additionally, they completed a series of standardized memory and cognitive assessments. Preliminary results demonstrate that participants perform worse on comprehension and memory questions in noise than in quiet. Further, performance on the memory questions in noise seem to correlate more strongly with the cognitive assessment than the standardized memory assessment. Ongoing work is analyzing interactions among comprehension question types (e.g., recall versus integration) and cognitive, speech perception, and memory abilities. Work supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, https://doi.org/10.37717/2021-3028.
Baese-Berk et al. (2025) studied this question.