Speech discrimination by elderly hearing instrument users

This study investigates the influences of aging on the speech discrimination abilities of elderly hearing instrument users. A survey method was used and thirty subjects, with the same degree of peripheral hearing loss, were divided into two groups of fifteen persons each. Group 1 consisted of elderly hearing instrument users who experienced little or no speech discrimination problems while group 2 consisted of persons with severe speech discrimination problems. The Synthetic Sentence Identification test, the Staggered Spondaic Word test and phonemically balanced words with an ipsi-competitive speech noise, were used to ascertain their speech discrimination capabilities in different listening situations. The elderly also completed a self-evaluation scale. The results of the study indicate that the aging process and changes in central auditory processing contribute to the complexity and diversity of elderly hearing instrument user's speech discrimination problems. The results also stress the importance of comprehensive intervention programmes for elderly hearing instrument users.