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Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearing| old_uid | 12568 |
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| title | Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearing |
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| start_date | 2013/06/06 |
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| schedule | 13h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Ampère, salle Jacques Cartier |
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| summary | Subjective reports suggest that older persons experience increased listening difficulties in noisy environments, and experimental investigations seem to confirm this age-dependent deficit. However, these listeners are generally unaware of their peripheral hearing status (i.e., whether or not they have a hearing loss) and most published studies used lax audiometric inclusion criteria. Hence, lower speech intelligibility could be explained by a reduction in audibility with age. Also, most studies limited their age comparison to groups of "young" (e.g. ≤ 30 years) and "older" listeners (e.g. ≥ 60 years), making it impossible to pinpoint the onset of the putative age effect.
This talk will present two cross-sectional investigations of central age effects on speech perception, using participants with clinically normal hearing over a fairly wide frequency range (≤ 20 dB HL for 0.125-4 kHz). Performance on supra-threshold temporal-processing and a battery of cognitive tasks (including tests of processing speed and working memory) was assessed, and compared with speech identification in quiet and in different (steady and fluctuating) background noises. To determine when during adulthood a decline with age in these abilities first becomes apparent, participants were sampled continuously from the entire adult age range (18-91 years).
Despite a large individual variability, the results show an age-dependent decline in speech identification, mainly above 60 years. Sensitivity to temporal information and cognitive performance deteriorated as early as young middle age, and correlated with speech-in-noise perception.
In conclusion, even when peripheral hearing sensitivity is clinically normal, the identification of speech in noise declines with age, and this deficit co-occurs with changes in retro-cochlear auditory processing and cognitive functions. |
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| responsibles | Lœvenbruck, Welby |
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