Research/Clinical Interests
Hearing Loss and Aging
Speech Perception of Normal-hearing, hearing-impaired, and elderly listeners
Auditory Temporal Processing
Speech Enhancement Signal Processing Techniques
Courses Taught in the Past Five Years
HESP 311: Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology of the Auditory System
HESP 606: Basic Hearing Measurement
HESP 636: Geriatric Audiology
HESP 701: Hearing Aids II
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Research/Clinical activities
- Principal Investigator on MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging, entitled, Auditory temporal processes, speech perception and aging (2002 - 2012).
- Research supplement to promote diversity in health-related research, awarded to Dr. Sandra Gordon-Salant, title: Auditory temporal processes, speech perception and aging, (to support research training for Sarah A. Friedman).
- Ad Hoc Member, NIH Study Section (2003).
- Member, National Research Council Committee on Disability Determination for Individuals with Hearing Impairments
- Member, National Institute of Medicine Committee on Medical Evaluation of Veterans for Disability Compensation
Elderly people experience difficulty understanding speech in poor acoustic environments, even when they are compared to younger listeners with matched hearing sensitivity. The implication is that there are factors specifically associated with the aging process that contribute to the speech perception problems of elderly people. Research in this laboratory has focused on examining some of these factors using several approaches: (1) identifying the effects of age-related cognitive changes on speech perception performance; (2) identifying procedural variables that are sensitive to age effects on listening tasks; and (3) investigating the relationship of age-related auditory temporal processing deficits to deficits in speech recognition performance.
Age-related cognitive changes appear to affect speech understanding performance. For example, selected tasks that increase cognitive demand are sensitive to age effects. In addition, elderly listeners employ a more risky response criterion than younger listeners on speech recognition measures. Thus, elderly listeners may not understand a message but respond as if they did understand it, which leads to communicative dysfunction.
Elderly listeners exhibit abnormally poor performance on duration discrimination tasks, which is highly related to deficits on recognition of reverberant speech. This finding supports the hypothesis that aging is accompanied by changes in processing the temporal characteristics of acoustic stimuli, and that these temporal processing problems contribute to the speech perception problems of elderly listeners in degraded acoustic environments. Our studies have also shown that older people have particularly difficulty on speech recognition tasks and temporal processing tasks that increase stimulus and task complexity. Recent work also suggests that for speeded speech, the primary problem for older listeners is recognizing brief, impoverished acoustic cues in consonants, rather than the limited processing time to identify an entire sentence. Current studies are investigating methods to selectively slow down the spoken message to determine if this type of signal processing technique is beneficial for older listeners in understanding speech.
Collaborative Projects:
Development of a research-based distortion-product otoacoustic emissions system, called OpenDP. This is work in collaboration with Dr. Ed Smith and Dr. Robert Dooling (Dept. of Psychology), and includes Dr. Tracy Fitzgerald and Erin McAlister (Hearing and Speech Sciences). This work is supported by a Core Center Grant awarded to Dr. Dooling. The initial project has been written up and submitted for publication (currently in review):
Gordon-Salant, S., Smith, E.W., McAlister, E.C., Fitzgerald, T.S., & Dooling, R. OpenDP: A new research tool for measuring distortion product otoacoustic emissions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (in review).
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Selected Publications
Gordon-Salant, S. Speech perception and auditory temporal processing performance by
older listeners: implications for real-world communication. Seminars in Hearing (in press)
Fitzgibbons, P., Gordon-Salant, S., & Friedman, S. (2006). Aging and temporal order recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120, 991-999.
Gordon-Salant, S. Yeni-Komshian, G., Fitzgibbons, P., & Barrett, J. (2006). Age-related differences in identification and discrimination of temporal cues in speech segments.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 2455-2466.
Gordon-Salant, S. (2006). Hearing loss and aging: New research findings and clinical
implications. Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 42, 9-23.
Fitzgibbons, P. & Gordon-Salant, S. (2004). Age effect on discrimination of timing in auditory sequences. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116, 1126 - 1134.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (2004). Effects of stimulus and noise rate variability on speech perception by younger and older adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115, 1808 - 1817.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Leek, M. (2004). Hearing Loss. Acoustical Society of America (invited article published online at http://www.acoustics.org, May, 2004).
Bar-Haim, Y., Marshall, P. J., Fox, N. A., Schorr, E. & Gordon-Salant, S. (2003). Mismatch negativity in socially withdrawn children. Biological Psychiatry, 54, 17-24.
Gordon-Salant, S. (2002). Hearing. In D. J. Ekerdt, R. A. Applebaum, K. C. Holden, et al. (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Aging, New York: Macmillan Reference USA.
Fozard, J. L., & Gordon-Salant, S. (2001). Sensory and perceptual changes with aging. In J. E. Birren, & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, Fifth Edition (pp. 241-266). San Diego: Academic Press, Inc.
Fitzgibbons, P. & Gordon-Salant, S. (2001). Aging and temporal discrimination in auditory sequences. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109, 2955-2963.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (2001). Sources of age-related recognition difficulty for time-compressed speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 709 - 719.
Phillips, S., Gordon-Salant, S., Fitzgibbons, P. & Yeni-Komshian, G. (2000). Frequency and temporal resolution in elderly listeners with good and poor word recognition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 217-228.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (1999). Profile of auditory temporal processing in older listeners. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 300-311.
Fitzgibbons, P. & Gordon-Salant, S. (1998). Auditory temporal order perception in younger and older adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 1052-1060.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (1997). Selected cognitive factors and speech recognition performance among young and elderly listeners. Journal of Speech, Language, Hearing Research, 40, 423-431.
Morrell, C. H., Pearson, J. D., Brant, L. J. & Gordon-Salant, S. (1997). Construction of hearing percentiles in women with non-constant variance from the linear mixed-effects model. Statistics in Medicine, 16 , 2475-2488.
Morrell, C., Gordon-Salant, S., Pearson, J., Brant, L. & Fozard, J. L. (1996). Percentage- and gender-specific reference ranges for hearing level and longitudinal changes in hearing level. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100, 1949-1967.
Fitzgibbons, P. & Gordon-Salant, S. (1996). Auditory temporal processing in elderly listeners: Speech and non-speech signals. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 7, 183-189.
Brant, L., Gordon-Salant, S., Pearson, J., Klein, L., Morrell, C., Metter, E. J. & Fozard, J. (1996). Risk factors related to age-associated hearing loss, Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 7, 152-160.
Fitzgibbons, P. & Gordon-Salant, S. (1995). Duration discrimination with simple and complex stimuli: Effects of age and hearing sensitivity. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 98, 3140-3145.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (1995). Recognition of multiply degraded speech by young and elderly listeners. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 1150-1156.
Gordon-Salant, S. & Fitzgibbons, P. (1995). Comparing recognition of distorted speech using an equivalent signal-to-noise ratio index. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 706-713.
Hargus, S. E. & Gordon-Salant, S. (1995). Accuracy of speech intelligibility index predictions for noise-masked young normal listeners and for elderly hearing impaired listeners. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 234-243.
Pearson, J. D., Morrell, C., Gordon-Salant, S., Brant, L. & Fozard, J. L. (1995). Gender differences in a longitudinal study of age-associated hearing loss. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 1196-1205.
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