Effects of different noises on speech discrimination by the elderly.
Elderly people often complain of difficulty in speech discrimination, especially in noise environments. The effects of 4 competing noises on sentence intelligibility were evaluated: speech noise, cocktail party noise, traffic noise and continuous discourse. A comparison was made between young and old normally hearing subjects and young and old hearing-impaired subjects with similar audiograms. The old people with normal hearing had slightly reduced discrimination compared to the young during competing speech noise and cocktail noise. Discrimination in the hearing-impaired elderly was also significantly worse than in the young people with normals hearing, during competing cocktail party noise, traffic noise and continuous discourse. The young hearing-impaired had results between young normal-hearing subjects and old hearing-impaired, except for continuous discourse. Thus the effects of age on speech discrimination in noise are subtle, becoming more pronounced in the presence of hearing loss. Age-related changes in primary speech discrimination were particularly evident during competing continuous discourse.
Prosser
S
S
Institute of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Ferrara, Italy.
Turrini
M
M
Arslan
E
E
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D011304:Presbycusis / Q000175:diagnosis*; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*