Speech listening difficulty and word intelligibility of aged listeners in reverberant sound fields

Abstract

The experiment was performed to present the effect of hearing loss on listening difficulty and word intelligibility with aged subjects in same sound fields of the previous work [M. Morimoto et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 2633 (2000)], and the result of this experiment is compared with this previous work. In the test, both the listening difficulty and the intelligibility were assessed using word lists based on word familiarity. The results demonstrate that (1) The relation between listening difficulties of young subjects and aged subjects is highly correlated. The range of scores of aged subjects is half of that of young subjects. (2) This word intelligibility score of young subjects is higher than that of aged subjects by 25% in all conditions. This result is the same as the previous work [H. Sato et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 2634 (2000)]. (3) The relation between listening difficulty and word intelligibility shows the same tendency for the both aged and young subjects. (4) Hearing level has a good correlation with listening difficulty and word intelligibility scores.