Impairments in the ability of elderly people to comprehend affective prosody have been reported, but little is known about the relationship between affective prosodic comprehension and age-related changes in hearing and cognition. The Aprosodia Battery, which included an assessment of attitudinal comprehension, was used to compare affective-prosodic comprehension in young and elderly subjects and to investigate the relationship of results to selected hearing and neuropsychological measures. As a group, the healthy elderly subjects were impaired relative to young subjects on all tasks assessing comprehension of affective prosody. Variability within the elderly group was not predicted by mild to moderate peripheral hearing loss and was only marginally predicted by traditional cognitive measures. These findings along with those of other researchers suggest that loss of affective-prosodic comprehension in elderly persons is related to a specific aging effect that impairs right hemisphere function.

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Speech intelligibility scores from 16 subjects with sensorineural hearing loss were evaluated using a digitized version of the California Consonant Test that was presented via headphones through a 300 to 3000 Hz bandpass filter to simulate the telephone band. Each subject was tested with an unprocessed signal that was frequency-equalized to compensate for the individual's hearing loss, and a signal that was equalized and compressed by the use of a compressor compression technique. Subjects were tested at three sound pressure levels above a pure-tone average threshold for frequencies 1 and 2 kHz. Two digital signal processing techniques designed to compensate for high-frequency hearing loss were examined: frequency domain processing and time domain processing. Frequency domain involved modification of the short-term spectrum obtained through a fast Fourier transform, whereas time domain processing involved passing the signal through a bank of finite impulse response filters. Both techniques showed significant intelligibility improvements (15-3070). In a second experiment, 16 additional subjects with high-frequency hearing loss compared an amplified telephone signal to three processed signals: (1) 6 dB per octave emphasis; (2) a signal frequency equalized for their hearing loss; and (3) a signal that was equalized for their hearing loss and was compressed according to their uncomfortable loudness levels. Most subjects preferred the signal with the 6 dB per octave emphasis. (Ear Hear 13 2:70-79)

Release-from-masking effects provided by a digital hearing aid signal processor utilizing multiple-microphone inputs were evaluated with three measures of speech recognition. Speech recognition measures were monosyllabic word recognition score, reaction time, and subjective rating of the intelligibility of selected passages of continuous discourse. Microphones, placed on KEMAR, recorded speech stimuli embedded in cafeteria noise yielding S/N ratios of 0 and 8 dB SPL. Half of the speech-in-noise stimuli were processed through the hearing aid digital signal processor while half remained unprocessed. The hearing aid processor utilizes a technology similar to adaptive-beamforming to reduce the masking effects of background noise on speech recognition. Unprocessed and processed speech-in-noise stimuli were presented to 10 normally hearing subjects, 10 hearing-impaired subjects, and 10 hearing-impaired individuals fit with linear amplification. Comparison of word recognition scores, reaction times, and intelligibility ratings for the two S/N ratios between unprocessed and processed speech-in-noise stimuli suggest that the hearing aid processing scheme provides significant release-from-masking effects which may improve the recognition of speech in noise for normally hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.