AGE-RELATED AND GENDER-RELATED CHANGES IN MONAURAL SPEECH RECOGNITION

Previous studies of older listeners suggest age-related declines in sp eech recognition. However, the interpretation of these results is not straightforward because auditory thresholds, which account for the lar gest proportion of the variance in speech-recognition scores, also var y considerably with age. Here, effects of age, gender, and auditory th resholds on several measures of speech recognition were assessed for a large sample of individuals enrolled in a longitudinal study of age-r elated hearing loss. Participants ranged in age from 55-84 years. They were evaluated with a battery of conventional audiometric measures an d speech-recognition materials, including NU-6 monosyllabic words, Syn thetic Sentence Identification sentences, and high-context and low-con text sentences From the Speech Perception in Noise test. Two analyses were conducted to assure that changes in speech-recognition scores wit h age were examined independently of age-related changes in auditory t hresholds. In the first analysis, no significant differences in speech recognition were observed for individuals in three age groups (55-64, 65-74, 75-84 years) who were selected so that average pure-tone thres holds for the groups were within 5 dB. In the second analysis, using p artial correlations to adjust both score and age For their association with average thresholds, significant declines with age were observed for males in maximum word recognition, maximum synthetic sentence iden tification, and keyword recognition in high-context sentences. For fem ales, no significant changes in speech recognition with age were obser ved for any test.