SPEECH RECOGNITION BY THE HEARING-IMPAIRED ELDERLY

许多老年人都有听力障碍 足以对他们理解言语的能力产生不利影响。 拟议的项目审查了可能导致 听障人士在理解言语方面的困难 老人 拟议的项目采用了一种跨部门的方法， 在言语理解的两个主要方面存在年龄差异 过程：（1）周边编码机制;（2）认知加工。 在周边编码机制方面，实验将研究 听力受损者的语言理解缺陷 老年人的听力损失可以单独解释， 声刺激的编码表示被 由于感觉神经性听力损失而内部退化。 建模 单纯性耳聋伴感音神经性听力损失 和复杂的声音刺激，包括语音信号，也将被 执行。 在言语的认知处理中，与言语相关的差异也将被 考察 通常假设语音的退化 刺激，无论是内部降解（通过耳朵处理， 感音神经性听力损失）或外部（噪声、混响、合成 语音），将增加对更高层次的认知处理的要求 言语刺激。 据推测，老年人的听力- 受损的听众在认知速度方面普遍存在缺陷， 与相关的增加的处理需求交互的处理 与退化的外围输入产生严重的语言理解 这个人群的困难。 认知缺陷的相互作用 将研究外围输入退化的处理 通过研究小学和中学教育中与年龄有关的差异， 记忆和使用上下文信息， 外部退化的语言

Many of the elderly are hearing impaired with the hearing impairment sufficient to have an adverse effect on their ability to understand speech. The proposed project examines various factors which may contribute to the speech-understanding difficulties experienced by the hearing-impaired elderly. The proposed project uses a cross-sectional approach to examine age-related differences in two primary aspects of the speech-understanding process: (1) peripheral encoding mechanisms; and (2) cognitive processing. In the area of peripheral encoding mechanisms, experiments will investigate haw much of the speech-understanding deficits of the hearing-impaired elderly can be explained by the loss of hearing sensitivity alone and the extent to which the encoded representation of the acoustic stimulus is degraded internally by the sensorineural hearing loss. Modeling of the internal degradation that accompanies sensorineural hearing loss for simple and complex acoustic stimuli, including speech signals, will also be performed. Age-related differences in the cognitive processing of speech will also be examined. It is generally hypothesized that degradation of the speech stimuli, whether degraded internally (processed through an ear with sensorineural hearing loss) or externally (noise, reverberation, synthetic speech), will place increased demands on higher-level cognitive processing of speech stimuli. It is further hypothesized that elderly hearing- impaired listeners have a general deficit in the speed of cognitive processing that interacts with the increased processing demands associated with the degraded peripheral input to produce severe speech-understanding difficulties in this population. The interaction of deficits in cognitive processing with degradation in peripheral input will be investigated through examination of age-related differences in primary and secondary memory and in the use of contextual information for internally and externally degraded speech.