Aging and consonant errors in reverberation and noise

Identification accuracy and error patterns on the City University of New York (CUNY) Nonsense Syllable Test were examined for three groups of subjects (young normal-hearing, older hearing-impaired, and older with minimal hearing loss) listening binaurally in four conditions (quiet, noise, reverberation, and reverberation plus noise). Percent-correct performance was analyzed for stimuli aggregated by place and manner categories, and error patterns were examined via analysis of variance and correlational procedures. Results suggested that some of the difficulty experienced by the older subjects was related to amount of hearing loss, but a portion of the data could not be explained by elevated auditory thresholds. Confusion patterns also varied across listening conditions, especially for the nasal and semivowel stimuli.