Auditory Temporal Processes, Speech Perception and Aging

THIS STUDY IS CURRENTLY RECRUITING PARTICIPANTS.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to investigate how hearing status and age affect understanding of speech signals that are spoken at a normal rate, spoken by a person with an accent, or spoken with altered timing characteristics. The project also will investigate whether a listener's ability to perceive certain timing aspects of sound is related to speech understanding ability.

Eligibility: We are looking for adults between the ages of 18-45 with normal hearing and the ages of 65 or older with normal hearing and with hearing loss.

The procedures involve a number of experiments, during which you will be seated in a sound-attenuating room and will listen to sounds presented through earphones at a comfortable listening level. Half of the experiments will be speech experiments, in which you will hear isolated words, a sequence of words, isolated sentences, or a sequence of sentences, presented in quiet or with a noise background. You will be asked to choose the target word you heard from a set of choices, make judgments about the similarity of words or sentences in a sequence, or write down the word ore sentence you heard. Half of the experiments will involve presentation of tonal sequences, and you will be asked to judge which tonal sequence is different from the others presented. You will be given a hearing test prior to the experiments, as well as four brief tests that assess your memory and speed of information processing.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Helen Hwang, Maureen D'Antuono, or Keena James
hearingresearch@hesp.umd.edu
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
University of Maryland , College Park
College Park , MD 20742
(301) 405-7454

Sandra Gordon-Salant, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator)
sgordon@hesp.umd.edu