The effect of aging on auditory processing: Temporal resolution and informational masking

Abstract

This study examined age-related changes in temporal resolution and speech perception in noise. Older listeners tend to exhibit more difficulty listening in noise, especially, understanding speech in complex noise, such as temporally modulating noise. The current study examined younger and older listeners for their understanding of speech in spectrally remote modulating noise. When the spectrum of noise is distant from that of speech, the effect of energetic masking would be minimized, leading us to measure the effect of informational masking on speech perception. We hypothesized that older listeners may show a significant amount of informational masking even when the noise spectrum is distant from the speech spectrum due to greater central interference of the noise compared to younger listeners. We also measured pure tone glide detection in steady and gated noise (Nelson etal., 2011). When the pure tone frequency changes from low to high (or high to low), which is similar to spectral change in speech, older listeners might have more difficulty detecting glides in modulating noise than younger listeners because they would not be able to detect spectral changes available in the brief dips in the modulating noise.