Abstract
Attending to a stream of speech amid competing speech in the presence of reverberation is an everyday task that many adults with normal hearing thresholds take for granted. Recently, though, we've shown that this ability varies widely for individual young and middle-age listeners and that the variability is not related to listener age. In this follow-up study, we recruited additional middle-aged listeners whose data reveal important differences between young and middle-age normal hearing adults and their use of fine structure and envelope cues in directed spatial attention. Twenty-two listeners ranging in age from 20 to 55 years completed spatial selective attention and frequency modulation (FM) detection tasks and had passive frequency following responses (FFRs) to a monotonized /dah/ syllable recorded with scalp electrodes. Although spatial selective attention ability was unrelated to age, older listeners were more impaired by reverberation than younger listeners. The FFR data was analyzed with a method that separates the contributions of fine structure and envelope phase locking, and results depict an age-related transition in envelope and fine structure relationships with complex listening.
Published Version
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