Effects of Aging and Age-Related Hearing Loss on Emotion Identification in Prosodic and Semantic Channels

Accurate perception of emotional status conveyed in speech signal is crucial for communication. Aging is known to have negative effect on speech perception. Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) may exert additional effects on speech processing. In this study, we investigated how these two factors influence emotion identification in prosodic and semantic channels by examining the performance of three groups of participants: younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA) with normal hearing and with hearing loss. The results revealed that OA with hearing loss demonstrated degraded performance than their normal hearing counterparts and YA in both prosodic and semantic channels. Moreover, only OA with hearing loss showed the influence of channel in that their recognition accuracy in the prosodic channel was lower. These findings suggested that ARHL significantly contributes to the inferior emotion perception in OA, and it may especially manifest itself in the conditions where fine-tuning of auditory perception is required.