Auditive and cognitive factors in speech perception by elderly listeners. I: Development of test battery

This study compares performance of 24 young normal-hearing (aged 18-28 years) and 24 elderly (aged 61-85 years) listeners on auditive (sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and temporal resolution), cognitive (memory performance, processing speed, and divided attention ability), and speech perception tests (at the phoneme, spondee, and sentence level). Its principal aim is to assess whether the tests selected yield meaningful results. The results obtained will be used to reduce the test battery in order to be manageable in a second study on a much larger number of elderly listeners. The relationships between the tests are explored by multivariate statistical methods. The results show that: (a) in young listeners, individual differences in speech perception performance are remarkably small resulting in low correlations between the tests, while in the elderly tests of phoneme, spondee, and sentence perception overlap considerably; (b) speech perception in the elderly seems to be largely determined by hearing loss at the higher frequencies, whereas the effects of other auditive and cognitive factors seem to be relatively small or absent; and (c) performance in the elderly is only partly correlated with age.