Abstract
Prior studies investigated why older adults, even in the absence of hearing impairment, typically experience increased difficulties understanding speech in noise. ("Speech understanding and aging. Working Group on Speech Understanding and Aging. Committee on Hearing, Bioacoustics, and Biomechanics, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council" 1988); (Dubno et al. 2002); Helfer et al. (2008) According to CHABA age has been found to be a determining factor in the ability to understand speech. This age effect can be related to age-dependent alterations in one or several of three processing domains: peripheral, central, and cognitive. The peripheral domain, in particular the performance of the inner ear is motivation in the present work.
Our study covered a selection of measures of hearing acuity, temporal processing, frequency selectivity and a speech recognition task in noise to get a broad profile of performances between young and elderly listeners.
For a realistic and external valid impression of hearing performance of young and elderly participants in the present study both groups were not matched. We knew about the supposed weakness in the design, as we dipped into the discussion of peripheral age-related factors.
Our study focused on supra-threshold auditory functions in young and elderly listeners without self-reported hearing loss referring to worse speech identification performance in elderly and less ganglion cells in aging inner ears.
Kegel, Andrea