Measures of hearing threshold and temporal processing across the adult lifespan.
Psychophysical data on hearing sensitivity and various measures of supra-threshold auditory temporal processing are presented for large groups of young (18-35 y), middle-aged (40-55 y) and older (60-89 y) adults. Hearing thresholds were measured at 500, 1414 and 4000 Hz. Measures of temporal processing included gap-detection thresholds for bands of noise centered at 1000 and 3500 Hz, stimulus onset asynchronies for monaural and dichotic temporal-order identification for brief vowels, and stimulus onset/offset asynchronies for the monaural temporal masking of vowel identification. For all temporal-processing measures, the impact of high-frequency hearing loss in older adults was minimized by a combination of low-pass filtering the stimuli and use of high presentation levels. The performance of the older adults was worse than that of the young adults on all measures except gap-detection threshold at 1000 Hz. Middle-aged adults performed significantly worse than the young adults on measures of threshold sensitivity and three of the four measures of temporal-order identification, but not for any of the measures of temporal masking. Individual differences are also examined among a group of 124 older adults. Cognition and age were found to be significant predictors, although only 10-27% of the variance could be accounted for by these predictors.
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-7002, USA. humes@indiana.edu
Larry E
LE
Humes
Diane
D
Kewley-Port
Daniel
D
Fogerty
Dana
D
Kinney
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003071:Cognition; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011601:Psychophysics; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult