Speech recognition thresholds in reverberation: Effects of age and hearing loss

Abstract

While young normally hearing individuals can function in moderate amounts of reverberation with a minimal reduction in speech understanding, older individuals with and without hearing loss are much more susceptible to reverberant distortions of the speech signal (Harris and Reitz, 1985; Danhauer and Johnson, 1991; Helfer, 1992). In this experiment, we evaluated the individual contributions of age and hearing loss to speech reception thresholds (SRT) for reverberant speech (T60: 0, 300, 600, and 1000 ms) in the presence of speech-shaped noise. A one-up one-down adaptive-tracking procedure was used to measure SRT in the better ear of each of 27 listeners. Results indicated, as expected, that older-hearing-impaired listeners had higher SRTs as compared to younger and older normally hearing listeners. However, the variability among listeners was very high. Multiple regression analyses predicting SRT with age and hearing loss as factors indicated that hearing loss was the most significantly contributing factor...