Early aging and postural control while listening and responding.

It is not unusual for communication to take place while people are involved in another activity. This paper describes a study that measures the impact of listening while also completing an active postural control task. The focus was on whether the combination of listening and balancing was more detrimental to middle-aged adults than it was to younger adults as age-related changes in both hearing and postural control can occur within this age range. Speech understanding in the presence of noise and speech maskers was measured when participants (n = 15/group) were simply standing still, as well as when they were asked to complete a balancing-with-feedback postural control task, requiring different levels of effort. Performance on the postural control task also was measured in isolation. Results indicated that dual-task costs for postural control were larger when the masker was speech (vs noise) for the middle-aged group but not for the younger group. Dual-task costs in postural control increased with degree of high-frequency hearing loss even when age was controlled. Overall, results suggest that postural control in middle-aged adults can be compromised when individuals are communicating in challenging environments, perhaps reflecting an increased need for cognitive resources to successfully understand messages.