Cognitive and auditory influences on speech recognition by younger, middle-aged, and older listeners

Abstract

In this study, we measured hearing thresholds and cognitive abilities (working memory, processing speed, executive function, and inhibition) in our participants to determine how these factors relate to speech understanding in the presence of competing speech. Participants were younger, middle-aged, and older adults, with the older adults having hearing thresholds that ranged from normal to a moderate hearing loss. The target stimuli for this study were recordings of TVM sentences (Helfer & Freyman, 2009) presented with various types of maskers (one or two other TVM sentences spoken by same-sex maskers, samples of running speech spoken by one or two same-sex talkers, and single-channel signal-envelope-modulated noise) at several signal-to-noise ratios. This poster will discuss speech recognition performance in the framework of multimasker penalties and will detail connections among hearing thresholds, cognitive abilities, and speech understanding. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.