Does it take older adults longer than younger adults to perceptually segregate a speech target from a background masker?
Does it take older adults longer than younger adults to perceptually segregate a speech target from a background masker?
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DOI：
10.1016/j.heares.2012.04.022
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发表时间：
2012-08-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
Schneider, Bruce A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ben-David, Boaz M.;Tse, Vania Y. Y.;Schneider, Bruce A.
当有其他人在说话时，老年人往往比年轻人更难注意到目标说话者。这种困难的一个可能原因是，他们可能需要更长的时间来感知分离目标语音从竞争语音。这项研究调查了年龄相关的差异，它所需要的时间来隔离目标语音从语音频谱噪声掩蔽或多路复用掩蔽（许多人同时说话）。具体而言，我们采用了五种不同的延迟（0.1秒-1.1秒）之间的掩蔽语发作和目标语音发作。四个信号掩蔽比，在每个延迟，以确定50%的阈值时，目标词被掩蔽的语音频谱噪声或多说话者的胡言乱语的词识别精度。当掩蔽物是语音频谱噪声时，作为掩蔽物-词-起始延迟的函数，单词识别的阈值呈指数下降，对于年轻人和老年人来说以相同的速率下降。当掩蔽物是牙牙学语时，年轻成年人的阈值随着延迟以与掩蔽物是语音频谱噪声时相同的速率呈指数下降。然而，老年人的单词识别阈值在本研究中探索的延迟范围内似乎没有变化。此外，年轻人和老年人的单词识别阈值之间的平均差异（年轻人阈值<老年人阈值）在掩蔽物是牙牙学语时显著大于噪声时。这些结果表明，老年人一样快，年轻的成年人在分离语音从一个稳定的状态噪声掩蔽，但不能够作为年轻的成年人利用延迟发作的语音目标时，掩蔽是牙牙学语。年龄相关的感官和认知能力下降，这些流隔离效应的潜在贡献进行了讨论。最后，我们得出结论，年龄相关的差异流隔离的时间轴的困难，老年人在听讲话的背景下的牙牙学语的经验。(C)2012 Elsevier B. V.保留所有权利。
Older adults often find it more difficult than younger adults to attend to a target talker when there are other people talking. One possible reason for this difficulty is that it may take them longer to perceptually segregate the target speech from competing speech. This study investigated age-related differences in the time it takes to segregate target speech from either a speech spectrum noise masker or a babble masker (many people talking simultaneously). Specifically, we employed five different delays (0.1 s-1.1 s) between masker onset and target speech onset. Four signal-to-masker ratios were employed at each delay to determine the 50% thresholds for word recognition accuracy when target words were masked by either speech spectrum noise or multi-talker babble. Thresholds for word recognition decreased exponentially as a function of the masker-word-onset delay, at the same rate for younger and older adults, when the masker was speech spectrum noise. When the masker was babble, thresholds for younger adults decreased exponentially with delay at the same rate as they did when the masker was speech spectrum noise. The word recognition thresholds for older adults, however, did not appear to change over the range of delays explored in this study. In addition, the average difference between word recognition thresholds for younger and older adults (younger adult thresholds < older adult thresholds) was significantly larger when the masker was babble than when it was noise. These results indicate that older adults are as fast as younger adults at separating speech from a steady-state noise masker, but are not as capable as younger adults of taking advantage of the delayed onset of the speech target when the masker is babble. The potential contributions of age-related sensory and cognitive declines to these stream segregation effects are discussed. Finally, we conclude that age-related differences in the timeline for stream segregation contribute to the difficulties older adults experience in listening to speech in a background of babble. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.