Effects of hearing and cognitive impairment in sentence recognition.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effects of hearing and cognitive impairment in sentence recognition in elderly people.

METHODS

The study included 30 elderly individuals divided into two groups: GI, with 17 elderly people without hearing loss and GII, with 13 elderly people with mild hearing loss. In order to evaluate their cognition, the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) was performed, whereas, for the evaluation of the auditory effects, the Portuguese Sentence List (PSL) was performed, in which the sentence recognition thresholds in silence (SRTS) and the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) were researched.

RESULTS

In MMSE, there was a higher percent of individuals with alteration for GI group when compared with GII group. In both SRTS and S/N, the GI group presented lower thresholds when compared with the GII group for both ears. Regarding the cognitive aspects, no significant statistical difference between normal and altered groups was observed in the MMSE for SRTS and S/N for GI and GII in both ears.

CONCLUSION

Mild hearing loss exerted influence on the sentence recognition in silence and in noise. On the other hand, the cognitive aspects did not interfere in speech recognition in both silence and noise.