A male-female speaker interaction for speech discrimination in noise with elderly compared to college age listeners

Abstract

Speech discrimination was measured in quiet and in noise for 30 elderly and 30 college-age listeners using a recorded male and female speaker. Results indicated there were no differences in intelligibility between speakers for the quiet condition. In contrast, for the noise condition, the male speaker was approximately 12% more intelligible than the female for the elderly group but approximately 16% less intelligible than the female for the younger group. This relative difference of about 28 percent in discriminability between talkers for elderly compared to college age listeners indicates a strong interaction between speakers and listener groups. Some statistical analyses of the audiometric data from the elderly listeners and electroacoustic analyses of the speech of the talkers will be discussed in an attempt to account for the interaction effect that was found.