Kathy Pichora-Fuller: 'Ageing and the processing of sound'

Abstract: Auditory temporal processing problems associated with neural presbycusis likely account for the typical finding that older adults with good audiograms need about a 3 dB S:N advantage to match the performance of younger adults on a number of tasks ranging from word identification, sentence and discourse comprehension, and memory. The nature of these age-related differences in temporal processing will be related to speech and cognitive processsing during spoken language comprehension. The research focuses not on how many words are correctly identified but rather on inter- and intra-individual differences in how and when lexical access occurs in younger and older adults in a range of listening situations. This work has implications for technical and behavioral rehabilitative audiology.