Public address (PA) announcements are widely used, but noise and reverberation can render them unintelligible, and such an environment tends to degrade speech intelligibility more for older adults (OAs) than for younger adults (YAs). Furthermore, in an emergency, textual information available to the public may not coincide with PA announcements, and this mismatch may also contribute to degrading the intelligibility of the announcement. In this study, speech spoken in a normal or urgent style and preceded by congruent or incongruent text was presented to OA participants to investigate the effects of these parameters on word intelligibility in the presence of babble noise and reverberation. This study also investigated age-related differences between OAs and YAs using the same stimuli. The results showed that, while YAs performed better than OAs, the effect of urgent speech did not significantly differ with age. Urgent speech was more intelligible than normal speech, and the congruent text condition was more intelligible than the incongruent and no text conditions. An exploratory analysis showed that urgent speech improved speech intelligibility for OAs when congruent text was available, but not when absent or incongruent. Without congruent information, this listening test may have been too demanding for OAs, who could have had more difficulty processing the fixed timeline of the listening test, the faster urgent speech relative to normal speech, and informational masking because of the slowing of cognitive processing with age. A correlation was found between the average word correct rate for urgent speech and average audiometric thresholds; on the other hand, increased fundamental frequencies in urgent compared with normal speech was not the main predictor of the intelligibility of urgent speech among the OAs. The congruent text benefit in urgent speech was larger for OAs than for YAs in the previous study using the same stimuli. This demonstrates that compared with YAs, OAs may rely more on supportive prior knowledge or receive more benefit from the preceding text in challenging listening environments. These findings imply that age-related cognitive decline may explain the difficulties in speech perception in the presence of noise and reverberation among OAs; however, no definitive conclusions can be drawn. These results suggest that simple combinations of speaking style and textual information affect the intelligibility of emergency PA announcements among OAs, and thus, audiovisual congruence should be considered when announcements are made in public spaces.

公共广播 (PA) 广播被广泛使用，但噪音和混响会使它们变得难以理解，而且这样的环境更容易降低老年人 (OA) 的语音清晰度，而不是年轻人 (YA)。此外，在紧急情况下，公众可用的文本信息可能与公共广播公告不一致，这种不匹配也可能导致降低公告的可理解性。在这项研究中，向 OA 参与者呈现以正常或紧急风格说出的语音，并以一致或不一致的文本开头，以研究这些参数在存在杂音和混响的情况下对单词可懂度的影响。本研究还使用相同的刺激调查了 OA 和 YAs 之间与年龄相关的差异。结果表明，虽然 YAs 的表现优于 OAs，紧急言语的效果随年龄的增长没有显着差异。紧急语音比正常语音更易于理解，并且一致文本条件比不一致和无文本条件更易于理解。一项探索性分析表明，当有一致的文本时，紧急语音可以提高 OA 的语音清晰度，但在文本不存在或不一致时则不然。如果没有一致的信息，这个听力测试可能对 OA 来说要求太高了，他们可能更难处理听力测试的固定时间线，相对于正常语音更快的紧急语音，以及由于认知处理减慢而导致的信息掩蔽年龄。发现紧急语音的平均单词正确率与平均听力阈值之间存在相关性；另一方面，与正常语音相比，紧急语音的基频增加并不是 OA 中紧急语音可懂度的主要预测因素。在使用相同刺激的先前研究中，OAs 在紧急语音中的一致文本收益大于 YAs。这表明与 YAs 相比，OAs 可能更多地依赖于支持性的先验知识，或者在具有挑战性的听力环境中从前面的文本中获得更多的好处。这些发现意味着与年龄相关的认知能力下降可能解释了在 OA 之间存在噪声和混响的情况下言语感知的困难；然而，无法得出明确的结论。这些结果表明，说话风格和文本信息的简单组合会影响 OA 中紧急 PA 公告的可懂度，因此，