Speech discrimination in the elderly

Abstract

The performance of 39 elderly subjects on three speech discrimination tasks, viz, CID W-22 word lists, the SPIN test and compressed SPIN sentence lists, was investigated. The effects of age and audiometric configuration on discrimination ability were examined, and age was found to significantly differentiate between subjects while audiometric configuration did not prove to be significantly variable. With the exception of the HP sentences for the SPIN and compressed speech tests, scores for all other measures differ significantly and thus would seem to assess different aspects of discrimination. The implications of these results are discussed.