Age-Related Differences in the Processing of Temporal Envelope and Spectral Cues in a Speech Segment.
Matthew J Goupell, Casey R Gaskins, Maureen J Shader and 3 others
PMID 28562426WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults with normal hearing needed longer silent gaps to tell Dish and Ditch apart than younger adults.
Simulating cochlear implant processing made the contrast harder, especially when timing cues were reduced. Actual implant users were not tested.
Key findings
01Older normal-hearing participants needed 9.8 ms more silence than younger participants before hearing Ditch in unprocessed sounds.
02With fewer spectral channels, participants needed longer silence and were less able to tell Dish and Ditch apart.
03With a lower envelope cutoff, participants also needed longer silence and were less able to tell Dish and Ditch apart.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants had normal hearing, so the study used a vocoder to simulate cochlear implant processing rather than testing people who use implants. Only one word contrast, Dish and Ditch, was tested, so it may not show how older adults hear other speech sounds or sentences. The study included 19 younger and 15 older participants, so it cannot describe how common or large these effects are in a clinic. For some degraded conditions, participants did not clearly distinguish the words, and the analysis used a maximum 70-ms value or extrapolated curves, which can weaken age comparisons. The authors state that peripheral hearing differences may have contributed to the age-related differences.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that this study tested older cochlear implant users or proved that implant settings cause poorer speech understanding. The participants had normal hearing, and the researchers used a vocoder to simulate implant processing, not actual implants.