Contribution of auditory detection thresholds to speech recognition in temporally and spectrally degraded environments for older adults

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The influence of room acoustics and environmental noise can lead to masking and degradation of temporal and spectral properties of speech.These environmental factors also contribute to the well-documented large variability in speech recognition, particularly among listeners with hearing loss.Older adults with normal hearing (ONH) or sloping highfrequency hearing impairment (OHI) completed three speech recognition experiments consisting of 15-16 measures of temporally degraded speech with (1) degraded spectral cues, (2) competing speech-modulated noise, and (3) combined degraded spectral cues in speech-modulated noise.Speech was spectrally shaped according to each listener's pure-tone thresholds.Speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were determined at 50% percent correct recognition.To capture individual differences in auditory detection, principal components analysis was used to summarize the primary variance in detection thresholds from 0.25 to 8 kHz.This component explained an average of 32% and 52% of the variance in SRTs for ONH and OHI listeners, respectively.Further analysis revealed a primary contribution of detection thresholds below 1 kHz for both groups, with low frequency thresholds also differentiating SRTs under different types of distortion for OHI listeners.Results suggest the importance of low-frequency speech cues for glimpsing speech in temporally modulated backgrounds.

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