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If you can’t follow a conversation at a cocktail party or have trouble understanding fast-talkers, researchers at the University of Maryland have a few strategies to help you hear better.

The Neuroplasticity and Auditory Aging study, funded by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and conducted at the University of Maryland in College Park, is in its second phase this year.

“We’re aiming to retune an older person’s ability to understand speech to be more similar to that of a younger listener,” said Dr. Sandra Gordon-Salant, director of the university’s Doctoral Program in Clinical Audiology and the study’s principal investigator. “In this new phase of the study, we are training listeners to understand distorted speech signals better.”

As we age, we find it difficult to hear in noisy environments and may find it hard to understand accented English or rapid dialogue.

People ages 65 to 85 with normal hearing, hearing loss or even mild cognitive impairment are welcome to join the study.

Once enrolled, participants will visit the Neuroplasticity Research Center and affiliated hearing labs in College Park, Maryland, a total of four times. They’ll come into the lab in person for an intake assessment and pre-training session. Then they’ll borrow a free laptop so they can take six one-hour training sessions from home.

As part of the training, listeners will listen to sentences spoken at a rapid rate, with an accent, or in noise, and will be asked to repeat what they hear.

Participants will spend time in the lab in person to undergo one electroencephalogram (EEG) on each of three visits. The EEG measures the listener’s brainwaves in response to sound.

They’ll watch a movie while painless electrodes attached to the scalp detect electrical activity in their brains. The two-hour tests will show whether or not stronger pathways are evident in the auditory brain after training.

“We examine changes in behavioral performance as a result of the training as well as neural processing as a result of training,” Gordon-Salant said.

Although this is a randomized study with a control group, Gordon-Salant’s team will train the control group, too. “Even the active control group can get some benefit” from the study, she said.

During the training sessions, the better a participant does, the more they’re challenged.

“As they listen and get the feedback, their performance generally improves,” Gordon-Salant said. “That’s our hope.”

About a month after training, researchers will re-test people to see if they’ve retained any abilities.

“Often researchers see an immediate training benefit, but we’re hoping that the benefits last,” Gordon-Salant said.

Participants will be paid $12 per hour for their time.

For more information or to volunteer for the hearing study, call (301) 405-4236.