TEMPORAL FACTORS AND SPEECH RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE IN YOUNG AND ELDERLY LISTENERS

This study investigated factors that contribute to deficits of elderly listeners in recognizing speech that is degraded by temporal waveform distortion. Young and elderly listeners with normal hearing sensitivi ty and with mild-to-moderate, sloping sensorineural hearing losses wer e evaluated. Low-predictability (LP) sentences from the Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN) (Bilger, Nuetzel, Rabinowitz, & Rze czkowski, 1984) were presented to subjects in undistorted form and in three forms of distortion: time compression, reverberation, and interr uption. Percent-correct recognition scores indicated that age and hear ing impairment contributed independently to deficits in recognizing al l forms of temporally distorted speech. In addition, subjects' auditor y temporal processing abilities were assessed on duration discriminati on and gap detection tasks. Canonical correlation procedures showed th at some of the suprathreshold temporal processing measures, especially gap duration discrimination, contributed to the ability to recognize reverberant speech. The overall conclusion is that age-related factors other than peripheral hearing loss contribute to diminished speech re cognition performance of elderly listeners.