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Published on: January 24, 2020
Delayed Stream Segregation in Older Adults: More Than Just Informational Masking
Payam Ezzatian1, Liang Li, Kathy Pichora-Fuller
11Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and 2Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Objective:
To determine whether the time course for the buildup of auditory stream segregation differs between younger and older adults.
Design:
Word recognition thresholds were determined for the first and last keywords in semantically anomalous but syntactically correct sentences (e.g., "A rose could paint a fish") when the target sentences were masked by speech-spectrum noise, 3-band vocoded speech, 16-band vocoded speech, intact and colocated speech, and intact and spatially separated speech. A significant reduction in thresholds from the first to the last keyword was interpreted as indicating that stream segregation improved with time.
Results:
The buildup of stream segregation is slowed for both age groups when the masker is intact, colocated speech.
Conclusions:
Older adults are more disadvantaged; for them, stream segregation is also slowed even when a speech masker is spatially separated, conveys little meaning (3-band vocoding), and vocal fine structure cues are impoverished but envelope cues remain available (16-band vocoding).
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