Age-related differences in speech recognition performance as a function of test format and paradigm

This study assessed speech recognition performance by young and elderly listeners with normal hearing and mild sensorineural hearing loss on a variety of speech recognition tasks. The tasks varied in terms of presence of noise, stimulus presentation level, test format, and test paradigm. The purpose was to identify a set of test conditions which is sensitive for revealing the effects of age, independent of hearing loss. The results showed that young and elderly listeners usually did not exhibit significant performance differences in quiet or fixed-noise conditions. However, an age effect was observed consistently for all conditions involving an adaptive noise paradigm. These findings imply that the important variables to consider for revealing effects of age are the use of noise coupled with an adaptive paradigm.