Effects of aging and age-related hearing loss on talker discrimination

Paralinguistic information is as important as linguistic information. Being familiar with talker’s voice may facilitate speech perception, especially in challenging conditions. Previous studies have suggested that aging and age-related hearing loss lead to the deterioration of the phonetic and phonological processing ability. The current study aims to explore whether these two factors exert effects on the talker’ voice discrimination. Three groups of participants, including young adults (YA) and older adults (OA) with and without hearing loss, were tested on talker discrimination in four types of stimuli varying in language familiarity: Mandarin real words, pseudowords, Arabic words and reversed Mandarin words. The results showed that OA with and without hearing loss performed worse than YA in both nonnative and native conditions. OA with hearing loss further performed worse than OA with normal hearing in Mandarin real word condition. These findings indicated that aging and hearing loss affected both low-level phonetic and high-level phonological processing, but hearing loss had extra effect on phonological processing. Altogether, these results implied that OA could not utilize phonetic and phonological cues as effectively as YA, and OA with hearing loss encountered more difficulties in utilizing phonological cues in talker discrimination.