Phoneme Discrimination in Older Persons Under Varying Signal-To-Noise Conditions

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Abstract
Two groups of subjects, 10 older than 60 years of age and 10 between the ages of 18 and 30, having essentially normal hearing for pure tones at the speech frequencies, identified 16 consonants in a CV context. These syllables were presented at six sensation levels of noise over four signal-to-noise ratios. An analysis of variance of the mean percent correct responses showed that the older group performed significantly more poorly than the younger group over all listening conditions. However, there was no difference in the relative performance between the two groups as either the sensation level (SL) of noise was increased or the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio became poorer. An additional listening condition in which no noise was present in the signal and the syllables were presented at six sensation levels revealed results similar to the main experiment. Possible implications are presented.

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