Age effect in speech audiometry and in brainstem electric response audiometry

A review of the files of 152 patients with normal hearing or slight hearing loss revealed in the older age group that (1) scores on the synthetic sentence identification task (SSI, S/N = 0 dB) have a tendency to drop in comparison with the discrimination scores for phonetically balanced words in silence (PB), and that (2) the wave V of the auditory brainstem response shows a greater latency prolongation when the stimulation rate is increased. However, no statistical correlation between these two age-linked phenomena emerged, so they seem to be the result of two independent processes.