Advantage of talker differences and spatial separation for speech-on-speech listening in younger and older adults with good audiograms

Abstract

Older adults have more difficulty than younger adults understanding speech when there is competing speech, even if they have good audiograms. Age-related differences in listening may be due to declines in auditory temporal processing and/or cognition. We administered the LiSN-S (Cameron et al., 2011) to measure speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in younger and older adults with good audiograms. There were four test conditions, in which the target and competing speech were presented with the same or different voices at the same or different locations. Compared to younger listeners, older listeners obtained worse SRTs in all test conditions and they realized less advantage from talker differences and spatial separation between the target and competing speech. For both groups, the results obtained in the four test conditions were strongly associated with each other. We also assessed cognitive abilities and auditory temporal processing in the older adults. LiSN-S results in this group were strongly associated with measures of cognition, as well as pure-tone averages (PTA) for 9 and 10 kHz, but not PTAs for frequencies in the standard audiometric range or measures of temporal processing (tapping the use of fine structure and gap cues). © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.