title: Age equivalence in the benefit of repetition for speech understanding.
abstract: Although repetition is the most commonly used conversational repair strategy, little is known about its relative effectiveness among listeners spanning the adult age range. The purpose of this study was to identify differences in how younger, middle-aged, and older adults were able to use immediate repetition to improve speech recognition in the presence of different kinds of maskers. Results suggest that all groups received approximately the same amount of benefit from repetition. Repetition benefit was largest when the masker was fluctuating noise and smallest when it was competing speech.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 358 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA helfer@umass.edu, rlf@comdis.umass.edu.
authors.forename: Karen S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Helfer
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 358 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA helfer@umass.edu, rlf@comdis.umass.edu.
authors.forename: Richard L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Freyman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult