Age as a factor in the perception of temporal information in speech

Many older people have greater difficulty processing speech at suprathreshold levels than can be explained by audiometric configurations. Some of the difficulty may involve temporal information. This information can cue “rapid” versus "“rabid” longer first vowel and shorter silent closure cue “rabid”; shorter vowel and longer silence cue “rapid.” Productions of “rabid” were low‐pass filtered at 3500 Hz, and edited to create vowel and closure duration continua. Pure tone audiograms and speech discrimination scores were used to select the ten best hearing subjects among 50 volunteers over age 55. Randomizations of the stimuli were presented for labeling to this group, and to ten normal hearing volunteers under age 25 at 60 and 80 dB HL. Results show highly significant interactions of age with the other factors. These data indicate that the use of temporal information could be more fully exploited in audiological evaluations, and that age may affect which cues are used by a given subject in speech perception. [Work supported by NIH and by VA RER&D.]