Talker identification: Effects of masking, hearing loss, and age
Virginia Best, Jayne B. Ahlstrom, Christine R. Mason, Elin M. Roverud, Tyler K. Perrachione, Gerald D. Kidd, Judy R. Dubno · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
The ability to identify voices was examined under both quiet and masked conditions. Subjects were grouped by hearing status (normal hearing/sensorineural hearing loss) and age (younger/older adults). Listeners first learned to identify the voices of four same-sex “target” talkers in quiet, with a fixed amount of training. On each trial subjects identified which of the four target talkers was asking a brief question (e.g., “What is 2 plus 3?"), and response feedback was given. At test, subjects identified voices (1) in quiet, (2) masked by speech-shaped noise, and (3) masked by a single, unfamiliar same-sex talker. Masked conditions included a range of target-to-masker ratios. The psychometric functions obtained in the speech masker were shallower than those in the noise masker, analogous to typical findings for the task of sentence identification/intelligibility. Both younger and older adults with hearing loss, as well as older adults with normal hearing, generally performed more poorly than younger adults with normal hearing, although large individual differences were observed in all conditions. These preliminary findings suggest that both hearing loss and age may affect the recall of who spoke in conversations, which may contribute to listeners' difficulty in solving the “cocktail party problem.” [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD.]