Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

This article and any supplementary material should be cited as follows: Woods DL, Doss Z, Herron TJ, Yund EW. Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing. J Rehabil Res Dev. 2012;49(8):1277–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1682/JRRD.2011.08.0150

Slideshow ProjectDOI:10.1682/JRRD.2011.08.0150JSP

Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

David L. Woods, PhD; Zoe Doss; Timothy J. Herron;

E. William Yund, PhD



• Aim– Examine (1) age-related changes in ability to identify

consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in noise and (2) sentence reception thresholds (SeRTs).

• Relevance– Speech understanding in noise declines with age,

even with normal hearing. • Could reflect reductions in phonological processing ability

or impairments in semantic and lexical processing required for sentence understanding.



Method

• Tested 16 older subjects with normal hearing (ONH) and 16 younger subjects with normal hearing (YNH).– Experiment 1:

• California Syllable Test (CaST).

– Experiment 2:• Quick Speech in Noise Test.• Hearing in Noise Test.



Results• Experiment 1

– ONH subjects performed worse than YNH subjects, particularly for hard-to-identify consonants.

– Otherwise showed similar influences of consonant position, lexicality, and vowel nuclei.

– CaST performance was independently affected by age and audiometric thresholds.

• Experiment 2 – No significant age-related

changes in SeRTs. – SeRT preservation in ONH

subjects reflected age-resistant ability to identify easy consonants in noise and intact top-down contextual and lexical processing.



Age-related increases in consonant identification thresholds varied for different consonants.



Consonant Confusions.

Barycentric cluster

analysis of consonant

confusion patterns of

leading (left) and coda

(right) consonants for

YNH and ONH subjects.



Conclusion

• These results establish benchmark values that can be used to evaluate success of audiological rehabilitation in older subjects with hearing impairment.

Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

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