Linguistic masking release in older adults

Abstract

Past studies of speech-on-speech masking in children and young adults (YA) indicate that intelligibility of target speech can improve when target and masker speech are in different languages. We investigated whether such linguistic release from masking is obtained in older adults (OA) with age-typical hearing abilities. All participants were asked to recognize English sentences in the presence of two-talker maskers spoken in either English or Spanish presented at four different Signal-to-Noise ratios (SNR) to each group. Differences in energetic masking between the masker languages were minimized. Overall sentence recognition accuracy was greater for YA participants. However, both groups equally benefited from a linguistic mismatch in the target-masker language with a significant masking release for the Spanish language masker. The magnitude of masking release increased as SNR decreased, ranging across SNR conditions from 1 to 27 percentage points. Age, hearing-in-noise ability and hearing sensitivity of OA listeners did not correlate with masking release. Results confirm previous findings of masking release associated with a linguistic mismatch between target and masker speech, and indicate that in speech-on-speech masking older listeners can improve speech intelligibility by utilizing nonenergetic linguistic differences between the target and masker speech.