Omission rates of young and elderly listeners in word recognition testing

Elderly listeners, as a group, do not perform as well as younger listeners on tests of word recognition, particularly in the presence of competing noise. It has been suggested that elderly listeners may be less willing to guess at items when they are unsure of the correct response, and as a result omit more responses. Omitting responses on word recognition tests may deflate word recognition scores. To test whether elderly listeners actually do omit more responses on word recognition tests, a group of elderly normal-hearing adults was compared to a group of young normal-hearing adults. To promote guessing, ipsilateral multitalker babble was presented at individually determined levels that approximated 50 percent performance. The subjects responded to two lists of NU6 words, and numbers of omissions were recorded. The elderly group did not omit significantly more responses to word recognition test items than the younger group. Variability was high within both groups.