Eriksholm Research Centre, Oticon A/S, Kongevejen 243, DK-3070 Snekkersten, Denmark.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Sep;130(3):1542-58. doi: 10.1121/1.3608122.
This study aimed to clarify the basic auditory and cognitive processes that affect listeners' performance on two spatial listening tasks: sound localization and speech recognition in spatially complex, multi-talker situations. Twenty-three elderly listeners with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing impairments were tested on the two spatial listening tasks, a measure of monaural spectral ripple discrimination, a measure of binaural temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, and two (visual) cognitive measures indexing working memory and attention. All auditory test stimuli were spectrally shaped to restore (partial) audibility for each listener on each listening task. Eight younger normal-hearing listeners served as a control group. Data analyses revealed that the chosen auditory and cognitive measures could predict neither sound localization accuracy nor speech recognition when the target and maskers were separated along the front-back dimension. When the competing talkers were separated along the left-right dimension, however, speech recognition performance was significantly correlated with the attentional measure. Furthermore, supplementary analyses indicated additional effects of binaural TFS sensitivity and average low-frequency hearing thresholds. Altogether, these results are in support of the notion that both bottom-up and top-down deficits are responsible for the impaired functioning of elderly hearing-impaired listeners in cocktail party-like situations.
本研究旨在阐明影响听力正常的老年受试者在两种空间聆听任务（声源定位和复杂多说话人环境下的言语识别）中表现的基本听觉和认知过程。23 名患有轻度至中度感音神经性听力损失的老年受试者接受了两种空间聆听任务、单耳频谱波纹辨别测试、双耳时域精细结构（TFS）敏感性测试以及两个（视觉）认知测试（工作记忆和注意力）的测试。所有听觉测试刺激均经频谱成形，以便在每个聆听任务中为每位受试者恢复（部分）可听度。8 名年轻听力正常的受试者作为对照组。数据分析表明，当目标和掩蔽声沿前后维度分离时，所选听觉和认知测试指标既不能预测声源定位精度，也不能预测言语识别。然而，当竞争说话者沿左右维度分离时，言语识别性能与注意力指标显著相关。此外，补充分析表明，双耳 TFS 敏感性和平均低频听力阈值也有额外影响。总之，这些结果支持以下观点，即老年听力受损受试者在鸡尾酒会等情况下的功能障碍是由自下而上和自上而下的缺陷共同导致的。
