Effects of masker type, sentence context, and listener age on speech recognition performance in 1-back listening tasks

Studies have shown that older listeners with normal hearing have greater difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments than younger listeners even during simple assessments where listeners respond to auditory stimuli immediately after presentation. Older listeners may have increased difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening situations that require the recall of prior sentences during the presentation of new auditory stimuli. This study compared the performance of older and younger normal-hearing listeners in 0-back trials, which required listeners to respond to the most recent sentence, and 1-back trials, which required the recall of the sentence preceding the most recent. Speech stimuli were high-context and anomalous sentences with four types of maskers. The results show that older listeners have greater difficulty in the 1-back task than younger listeners with all masker types, even when SNR was adjusted to produce 80% correct performance in the 0-back task for both groups. The differences between the groups in the 1-back task may be explained by differences in working memory for the noise and spatially separated speech maskers but not in the conditions with co-located speech maskers, suggesting that older listeners have increased difficulty in memory-intensive speech perception tasks involving high levels of informational masking. (C) 2014 Acoustical Society of America.