Duration discrimination in younger and older adults

Abstract

Temporal modulation of the speech signal contributes to speech recognition in younger adults. Older listeners who have poor gap duration discrimination abilities show more trouble in understanding temporally degraded speech. Studies have shown that the contribution of age-related changes in temporal resolution to speech recognition are minimal. Age-related losses in detecting a gap may occur when the durations of the tones marking the gap are very short. Older adults have more difficulty in discriminating the signal durations than younger adults. The duration of stimuli has similar effects on younger and older adults duration ability of discrimination. The age effect is more at short standard tone durations, independent of audiometric threshold.