Word Identification With Temporally Interleaved Competing Sounds by Younger and Older Adult Listeners

Conclusions: Younger adults outperformed older adults when masker words were interleaved with target words. Results suggest that this difference was unlikely to be related to energetic masking and/or peripheral hearing loss. Rather, age-related changes in cognitive flexibility and problems encoding voice information appeared to underlie group differences. These results support the contention that, in real-life competing speech situations that produce both energetic and informational masking, older adults’ problems are due to both peripheral and nonperipheral changes.
Source: Ear and Hearing - Category: Audiology Tags: Research Article Source Type: research