Aging and consonant errors in reverberation and noise.

Area of Science:

• Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology
• Psychoacoustics
• Gerontology

Background:

• Hearing impairment and aging can affect speech understanding.
• Environmental listening conditions (noise, reverberation) pose challenges.
• The City University of New York (CUNY) Nonsense Syllable Test is a tool for assessing speech perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate speech identification accuracy and error patterns in older adults with varying hearing loss.
• To compare performance across different listening conditions: quiet, noise, reverberation, and combined.
• To determine the extent to which hearing loss explains speech identification difficulties in older adults.

Main Methods:

• Three subject groups: young normal-hearing, older hearing-impaired, older minimal hearing loss.
• Binaural listening in four acoustic conditions.
• Analysis of percent-correct scores and error patterns (place, manner) using ANOVA and correlational procedures.

Main Results:

• Older subjects showed reduced identification accuracy compared to young normal-hearing individuals.
• Hearing loss partially explained, but did not fully account for, the speech identification difficulties in older adults.
• Error patterns differed across listening conditions, particularly for nasal and semivowel sounds.
• Confusion matrices revealed specific phoneme confusions that varied with acoustic environment.

Conclusions:

• Speech identification deficits in older adults are complex, involving factors beyond pure-tone thresholds.
• Listening conditions significantly impact speech perception, especially for certain speech sound categories.
• Further research is needed to understand the non-auditory factors contributing to speech recognition difficulties in aging.