Effects of talker gender and spatial location on sentence recognition for young and old listeners with normal hearing

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the effect of gender and spatial difference between two talkers on the sentence recognition of young and old listeners with normal hearing. Gender difference was manipulated using gender-matched (i.e., male-male or female-female) or gender-mismatched (i.e., male-female or female-male) sentence pairs. Four spatial separation conditions (-45/45°, -90/90°, -135/135°, 180° azimuth) were presented through eight directional speakers. The ability of sentence recognition was identified by key word scoring. Overall, young normal-hearing (YNH) listeners performed better than old normal-hearing listeners (ONH) in all conditions. The gender mismatch between two talkers was beneficial to recognize closed-set sentences by creating the release from informational masking, more for the ONH group compared to the YNH group. The effect of spatial separation was not significant in both groups. Year of education for ONH listeners significantly affected their two-talker speech recognition. Results of individual differences in ONH listeners suggest that the ability to use acoustic cues given by gender and spatial difference between two competing talkers appears to be related to their cognitive ability.