title: Hearing loss, aging, and speech perception in reverberation and noise.
abstract: The present investigation examined the effect of reverberation and noise on the perception of nonsense syllables by four groups of subjects: younger (less than or equal to 35 years of age) and older (greater than 60 years of age) listeners with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss; younger, normal-hearing individuals; and older adults with minimal peripheral hearing loss. Copies of the Nonsense Syllable Test (Resnick, Dubno, Huffnung, & Levitt, 1975) were re-recorded under four levels of reverberation (0.0, 0.6, 0.9, 1.3 s) in quiet and in cafeteria noise at +10 dB S:N. Results suggest that both age and amount of pure-tone hearing loss contribute to senescent changes in the ability to understand noisy, reverberant speech: pure-tone threshold and age were correlated negatively with performance in reverberation plus noise, although age and pure-tone hearing loss were not correlated with each other. Further, many older adults with minimal amounts of peripheral hearing loss demonstrated difficulty understanding distorted consonants.
authors.affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Department of Communication Disorders, Amherst 01003.
authors.forename: K S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Helfer
authors.forename: L A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Wilber
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*