Speech recognition in the elderly.

The acuity of hearing and speech recognition has been checked in two groups of elderly persons: 1) Subjects aged between 50 and 80 years without any ear disease or hearing problems; 2) Subjects of similar age with noise-induced permanent hearing loss (NIPHL). The speech recognition threshold was evaluated in both groups by numbers of second order, and the speech recognition score was evaluated using monosyllables. The elder people in both groups did not show significant deviation from the normal speech recognition threshold. The speech recognition score for monosyllables was worse in both groups, and there was a significantly greater loss of speech recognition in the NIPHL group than in the elderly persons with normal hearing. Like hearing losses in the higher frequencies, speech recognition ability in healthy elderly persons can be regarded as just as much a function of the sum of acoustic traumas within the person's lifetime as a result of cerebral ageing processes. Real speech recognition losses and (in connection with them) problems in understanding speech in common situations are results of disturbances of hearing function resulting from any kind of pathology and not of ageing processes alone.