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Study on age-related changes in identifying consonants & sentence reception thresholds. Impact of phonological, semantic processing in speech understanding. Tests on older & younger subjects with normal hearing. Results show worse performance in identifying hard-to-identify consonants for older subjects. No significant age-related changes in sentence reception thresholds. Benchmark values established for audiological rehabilitation in older subjects.
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Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing David L. Woods, PhD; Zoe Doss; Timothy J. Herron; E. William Yund, PhD
Aim • Examine (1) age-related changes in ability to identify consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in noise and (2) sentence reception thresholds (SeRTs). • Relevance • Speech understanding in noise declines with age, even with normal hearing. • Could reflect reductions in phonological processing ability or impairments in semantic and lexical processing required for sentence understanding.
Method • Tested 16 older subjects with normal hearing (ONH) and 16 younger subjects with normal hearing (YNH). • Experiment 1: • California Syllable Test (CaST). • Experiment 2: • Quick Speech in Noise Test. • Hearing in Noise Test.
Results • Experiment 1 • ONH subjects performed worse than YNH subjects, particularly for hard-to-identify consonants. • Otherwise showed similar influences of consonant position, lexicality, and vowel nuclei. • CaST performance was independently affected by age and audiometric thresholds. • Experiment 2 • No significant age-related changes in SeRTs. • SeRT preservation in ONH subjects reflected age-resistant ability to identify easy consonants in noise and intact top-down contextual and lexical processing.
Age-related increases in consonant identification thresholds varied for different consonants.
Consonant Confusions. Barycentric cluster analysis of consonant confusion patterns of leading (left) and coda (right) consonants for YNH and ONH subjects.
Conclusion • These results establish benchmark values that can be used to evaluate success of audiological rehabilitation in older subjects with hearing impairment.