Aging and the effect of target-masker alignment
Karen S Helfer1, Gabrielle R Merchant1, Richard L Freyman1
1Department of Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 358 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|December 3, 2016
Summary
Speech recognition difficulties, especially for older adults, are less severe than previously thought when competing sounds are not spatially aligned with the target message. Similarity matters most when maskers surround the listener.
Area of Science:
- Auditory perception
- Speech processing
- Psychoacoustics
Background:
- Informational masking research often uses highly similar target and masking speech.
- Real-world listening environments rarely feature perfectly aligned competing speech.
- Previous studies may overestimate age-related speech recognition deficits.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of syntactic/semantic speech similarity on masking.
- To examine effects across different spatial configurations.
- To compare younger, middle-aged, and older adults' performance.
Main Methods:
- Participants listened to target speech with varying degrees of similarity and spatial separation from masking speech.
- Speech recognition was tested across different age groups and signal-to-noise ratios.
- Acoustic environments manipulated masker location (surrounding vs. one-sided).
Main Results:
- Age-related differences in speech recognition were greatest when maskers were similar and surrounded the target, particularly at poor signal-to-noise ratios.
- Masker similarity and spatial location had less impact on younger and middle-aged adults.
- Listeners showed greater resistance to masking when maskers were spatially separated from the target.
Conclusions:
- The spatial arrangement of competing speech significantly influences listening difficulty.
- High target-masker similarity exacerbates age-related deficits primarily in spatially complex conditions.
- Overestimation of age-related speech recognition problems may occur with highly aligned masking stimuli.
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