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Speech perception in noise in the elderly: the effect of text type

University of British Columbia

The purpose of the present study was to examine how age-related changes in hearing and cognition contribute to the poor speech perception performance in noise observed in elderly listeners. Passages of two different text types were presented in +6, 0, and -6 dB signal-to-noise conditions to eight normal-hearing elderly listeners. Highly structured narratives and less structured descriptions were presented in a clause-by-clause fashion using a modified tracking procedure. Subjects repeated what they heard verbatim. The number and types of errors were analyzed. It was found that elderly listeners made more errors as listening conditions became less favourable. Moreover, elderly subjects made more errors for descriptions than for narratives. It seems that the subjects were able to benefit from the supportive context, which was available to a greater extent in the narratives than in the descriptions, in order to compensate for the degraded auditory signal. These results were then compared to a previous study that examined the speech perception performance of younger, normal-hearing adults in the same conditions. It was found that elderly listeners performed more poorly than younger adult listeners as noise increased, regardless of text type. This finding is likely due to age-related declines in auditory processing abilities. Importantly, there were no age differences in the utilization of supportive context, suggesting that elderly listeners take advantage of text structure to the same extent as do young listeners.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3701

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace