Profiling of Temporal Processing and Speech Perception Abilities

An important property of sound is its variation as a function of time.This variation of acoustic properties overtime is important in analyzing the "meaning" of a sound.In spite of its perceptual importance, much is still unknown of how temporal information is analyzed and represented in the auditory system. Normal temporal processing is important for us to be able to understand speech in quiet and in background noise. Decline in the temporal processing abilities specifically gap detection in noise with the age is well documented in the literature. However, less attention has been paid to effect of age on other temporal process and its relation to speech perception. The present study was undertaken to document effect of age on different temporal process in normal hearing listeners from 17-70 years of age.Temporal processes that were measured were modulation detection,backward masking,duration discrimination, duration pattern and gap detection.Apart from this speech perception in noise and speech perception with vocoded signal was also measured. Results showed a systematic age related decline temporal processing and speech perception abilities.