Identification and Discrimination of Sound Textures in Hearing-Impaired and Older Listeners.
Oliver Scheuregger, Jens Hjortkjær, Torsten Dau
PMID 34939472WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing loss and age reduce the ability to identify complex sound textures, but the ability to distinguish between different textures remains intact.
Older listeners struggle specifically with discerning fine details in very short sound excerpts.
Key findings
01Hearing-impaired listeners identified sound textures less accurately than normal-hearing listeners across most synthesis conditions.
02The ability to discriminate between two different sound textures was not affected by age or hearing loss.
03Older listeners performed significantly worse than younger listeners when discriminating fine details within excerpts of the same sound texture, particularly at short durations.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used synthesized sounds rather than only real-world recordings, though real-world textures were included as a control. Sample sizes were small, particularly for the young hearing-impaired group (n=4), which was excluded from some statistical analyses. Participants listened without hearing aids, so results may not reflect performance with amplification. The superior performance of older hearing-impaired listeners over older normal-hearing listeners in exemplar discrimination may be due to prior experience with psychoacoustic tasks rather than hearing loss itself.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The work was supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation synergy Grant (UHeal).
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing loss impairs the ability to distinguish between different environmental sounds. The study found that texture discrimination was robust to hearing loss, while identification and fine-detail discrimination were affected.