Individual interaction between hearing and speaking due to aging

Abstract

It is well known that a hearing loss is induced by aging in a high frequency range. It is easy to imagine that the aging also alters characteristics of voice, because you can roughly estimate the speaker’s age. In general, those aging phenomena are discussed independently. In speech communication, however, the speech chain [Dense & Pinson, 1993] must dominate the interaction on the aging effects between hearing and speaking. Individual interaction between them is investigated using both his pure-tone audiometry test threshold and his recordings of read utterances. In this study, 21 Japanese elderly males, whose ages ranged from 62 to 85 years old, participated in pure tone audiometry and recording of Japanese sentence and word utterances. Concerning three elderlies with presbycusis, who are aware of hearing loss in daily lives, hearing abilities gradually decrease in proportion to frequency over 2 kHz, and spectral energies increase in the high frequency range over 4.5 kHz. In another case of high-frequency deafness, the spectral energy over 4.5 kHz increases significantly. On the other hand, elderly speakers with normal hearing do not cause energy lift of speech in high frequencies.