Comparison of speech intelligibility of elderly aged 60–69 years and young adults in the noisy and reverberant environment

Abstract

In contrast to young adults with the normal hearing ability, most of the elderly can difficultly hear the speech signals in an unfavorable noisy and reverberant environment. In this paper, the effect of noise and reverberation in a room environment on the Chinese speech intelligibility of elderly (60–69 years old persons) and young adults with the normal hearing ability at different reverberation time (RT), background noise level (BNL), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is investigated by using the auralization method. The results show that the speech intelligibility scores of Chinese elderly and young adults decrease with the increase in RT but increase with the increase in SNR. The obtained speech intelligibility scores of the young adults are higher than those of the elderly under the same test conditions. The speech intelligibility scores of the elderly are poorer than those of the young adults at high BNL, long RT, and low SNR. Namely, it is found that the elderly are more sensitive to the changes in reverberation case and reverberation plus noise case than the young adults. Moreover, the difference in the speech intelligibility scores between the elderly and young adults decreases with the decrease in the BNL. Lastly, it is shown that a low BNL is beneficial for improving the Chinese speech intelligibility of the elderly in a noisy and reverberant room environment.