title: Age-related changes in monosyllabic word recognition performance when audibility is held constant.
abstract: Monosyllabic word recognition was studied in 140 subjects between the ages of 20 and 90 years. The subjects were tested under a condition of fixed audibility that was achieved by presenting bandpass-filtered Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6) word lists at a constant signal-to-noise ratio and limiting threshold losses at the speech frequencies to 25 dB HL. The results indicated the following: (1) Performance did not vary appreciably with age, except among subjects over 70 years. Subjects from 70 to 80 years produced modestly reduced scores (significantly below only the 30-year-old group). Those over 80 years produced significantly lower scores (than all other groups). (2) There were no significant differences in learning or test-retest reliability associated with age. (3) The performance of the oldest subjects could not be explained by differences in speech audibility. Based on these results, a strategy is proposed for correcting predicted word recognition scores for the effects of age.
authors.affiliation: School of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Studebaker
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Sherbecoe
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: McDaniel
authors.forename: G A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Gray
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D001299:Audiometry; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013067:Speech Perception