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Aging and speech-on-speech masking.

Karen S Helfer1, Richard L Freyman

  • 1Department of Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA. khelfer@comdis.umass.edu

Ear and Hearing
|December 20, 2007
PubMed
Summary
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Older adults struggle more with speech-on-speech masking due to attention deficits, not increased masking. This impacts their ability to focus on a target voice in noisy environments, especially with hearing loss.

Area of Science:

  • Auditory perception and aging
  • Speech processing in complex acoustic environments

Background:

  • Older adults commonly report difficulty understanding speech in multi-talker situations.
  • Age-related hearing changes can increase sensitivity to energetic and informational masking, and affect cognitive function.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To differentiate the contributions of masking sensitivity and cognitive deficits in older adults' speech-on-speech masking difficulties.
  • To investigate age-related changes in auditory attention and voice discrimination.

Main Methods:

  • Compared sentence recognition in younger and older adults across four masker types (same-sex, opposite-sex, modulated noise, steady noise).
  • Assessed voice discrimination ability to determine incidental learning of target voice identification.
  • Included participants with varying degrees of hearing sensitivity.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Older adults performed significantly worse across all masker types, with the largest difference in same-sex masking.
  • Relative group differences showed the greatest effect for opposite-sex maskers.
  • Hearing loss correlated with poorer performance; voice discrimination ability did not predict speech recognition.

Conclusions:

  • Older adults show a deficit in selective attention to a target voice, irrespective of masker type.
  • This deficit, particularly in those with hearing loss, may stem from difficulties processing fluctuating maskers or age-related cognitive changes.
  • Informational masking itself does not appear to differ between age groups.