Effects of age and hearing loss on talker identification and talker change detection

Abstract

While the detrimental effects of age and hearing loss on word recognition and speech comprehension are well-established, surprisingly little is known about how these factors affect the ability to extract talker-related information from speech. Here, we describe two studies that used different behavioral tasks to address this question. In the first study (Talker Identification), listeners were trained to identify talkers by the sound of their voice, and then tested on their ability to identify those talkers in quiet or in the presence of background noise or competing speech. In the second study (Talker Change Detection), explicit talker identification was not required, but instead listeners detected if a change in talker had occurred within a sequence of words. In both studies, listeners were recruited in four groups to include younger/older ages and normal/impaired hearing. In both studies, we found that age and hearing loss had independent effects on performance. We argue that a reduced ability to make use of talker-related information in speech may contribute to the difficulty encountered by older listeners and listeners with hearing loss, when communicating in group situations.