Auditory Temporal Order Perception in Younger and Older Adults
Publication: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Volume 41, Number 5
Pages 1052-1060
Abstract
This investigation examined the abilities of younger and older listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequences. It was hypothesized that older listeners would exhibit greater difficulty than younger listeners on both temporal processing tasks, particularly for complex stimulus patterns. It was also anticipated that tone order discrimination would be easier than tone order identification for all listeners. Listeners were younger and older adults with either normal hearing or mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses. Stimuli were temporally contiguous three-tone sequences within a 1/3 octave frequency range centered at 4000 Hz. For the discrimination task, listeners discerned differences between standard and comparison stimulus sequences that varied in tonal temporal order. For the identification task, listeners identified tone order of a single sequence using labels of relative pitch. Older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination task for the more complex pitch patterns and on the identification task for faster stimulus presentation rates. The results also showed that order discrimination is easier than order identification for all listeners. The effects of hearing loss on the ordering tasks were minimal.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Abel, S., Krever, E., & Alberti, P. W. (1990). Auditory detection, discrimination and speech processing in ageing, noise-sensitive and hearing-impaired listeners. Scandinavian Audiology, 19, 43–54.
American National Standards Institute. (1989). Specifications for Audiometers (ANSI S3.6, 1989). New York: Author.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (1990). Guidelines for screening for hearing impairment and middle ear disorders. Asha, 32 (Suppl. 2), 17–24.
Bergman, M., Blumenfeld, V. S., Cascardo, D., Dash, B., Levitt, H., & Margulies, M. K. (1976). Age-related decrement in hearing for speech. Journal of Gerontology, 31, 533–538.
Bregman, A. S., & Campbell, J. (1971). Primary auditory stream segregation and segregation of order in rapid sequences of tones. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 89, 244–249.
Cerella, J. (1991). Age effects may be global, not local: Comment on Fisk and Rogers (1991). Journal of Experimental Psychology (General), 120, 215–223.
Divenyi, P., & Hirsh, I. (1974). Identification of temporal order in three-tone sequences. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 56, 144–151.
Fitzgibbons, P., & Gordon-Salant, S. (1994). Age effects on measures of auditory temporal sensitivity. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 662–670.
Fitzgibbons, P., & Gordon-Salant, S. (1995). Duration discrimination with simple and complex stimuli: Effects of age and hearing sensitivity. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 98, 3140–3145.
Gates, G. A., Cooper, J. C., Kannel, W. B., & Miller, N. J. (1990). Hearing in the elderly: The Framingham cohort, 1983–1985. Ear and Hearing, 11, 247–256.
Gordon-Salant, S., & Fitzgibbons, P. (1993). Temporal factors and speech recognition performance in young and elderly listeners. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 1276–1285.
Gordon-Salant, S., & Fitzgibbons, P. (1997). Selected cognitive factors and speech recognition performance among young and elderly listeners. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 40, 423–431.
Green, D. M. (1971). Temporal auditory acuity. Psychological Review, 78, 540–551.
Hawkins, H., & Pressen, J. (1986). Auditory information processing. In K. R. Boff, L. Kaufman, & J. P. Thomas (Eds.), Handbook of perception and human performance: Vol. II. Cognitive processes and performance (Chapter 6) . New York: Wiley-Interscience.
Humes, L. & Christopherson, L. (1991). Speech identification difficulties of hearing-impaired elderly persons: The contributions of auditory processing deficits. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 34, 686–693.
Johnson, D. M., Watson, C. S., & Jensen, J. K. (1987). Individual differences in auditory capabilities. I. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 81, 427–438.
Kirk, R. E. (1968). Experimental design: Procedures for the behavioral sciences. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Levitt, H. (1971). Transformed up-down method in psychoa-coustics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49, 467–477.
Moore, B. C. J., Peters, R. W., & Glasberg, B. R. (1992). Detection of temporal gaps in sinusoids by elderly subjects with and without hearing loss. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 92, 1923–1932.
Pearson, J. D., Morrell, C. H., Gordon-Salant, S., Brant, L., & Fozard, J. L. (1995). Gender differences in a longitudinal study of age-associated hearing loss. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 1196–1205.
Pfeiffer, E. (1975). A short portable mental status questionnaire for the assessment of organic brain deficit in elderly patients. Journal of the American Geriatric Society, 23, 433–441.
Pinheiro, M. L., & Musiek, F. E. (1985). Sequencing and temporal ordering in the auditory system. In M. L. Pinheiro & G. L. Musiek (Eds.), Assessment of central auditory dysfunction (pp. 219–238). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.
Salthouse, T. A. (1985). A theory of cognitive aging. New York: North-Holland.
Schneider, B. A., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Kowalchuk, D., & Lamb, M. (1994). Gap detection and the precedence effect in young and old adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95, 980–991.
Snell, K. B. (1997). Age-related changes in temporal gap detection. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101, 2214–2220.
Trainor, L. J., & Trehub, S. E. (1989). Aging and auditory temporal sequencing: Ordering the elements of repeating tone patterns. Perception and Psychophysics, 45, 417–426.
Warren, R. M. (1974). Auditory temporal discrimination by trained listeners. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 237–256.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
History
- Received: Jan 16, 1998
- Accepted: Jun 15, 1998
- Published in issue: Oct 1, 1998
Keywords
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Article Metrics
View all metricsCitations
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.
Citing Literature
- Zheng Xu, Binghan Xue, Joseph P. Y. Kao, Patrick O. Kanold, Sex-Specific Age-Related Changes in Excitatory and Inhibitory Intracortical Circuits in Mouse Primary Auditory Cortex, eneuro, 10.1523/ENEURO.0378-24.2024, 12, 2, (ENEURO.0378-24.2024), (2024).
- Abigail L. Noyce, Leonard Varghese, Samuel R. Mathias, Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham, Perceptual organization and task demands jointly shape auditory working memory capacity, JASA Express Letters, 10.1121/10.0025392, 4, 3, (2024).
- Kelson Shilling-Scrivo, Jonah Mittelstadt, Patrick O. Kanold, Decreased Modulation of Population Correlations in Auditory Cortex Is Associated with Decreased Auditory Detection Performance in Old Mice, The Journal of Neuroscience, 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0955-22.2022, 42, 49, (9278-9292), (2022).
- Sarah A. Sauvé, Jeremy Marozeau, Benjamin Rich Zendel, The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cues, PLOS ONE, 10.1371/journal.pone.0274631, 17, 9, (e0274631), (2022).
- Min Xu, Jing Shao, Hongwei Ding, Lan Wang, The effect of aging on identification of Mandarin consonants in normal and whisper registers, Frontiers in Psychology, 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.962242, 13, (2022).
- Vanessa C. Irsik, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Björn Herrmann, Age-related deficits in dip-listening evident for isolated sentences but not for spoken stories, Scientific Reports, 10.1038/s41598-022-09805-6, 12, 1, (2022).
- Kelson Shilling-Scrivo, Jonah Mittelstadt, Patrick O. Kanold, Altered Response Dynamics and Increased Population Correlation to Tonal Stimuli Embedded in Noise in Aging Auditory Cortex, The Journal of Neuroscience, 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0839-21.2021, 41, 46, (9650-9668), (2021).
- Ramya Vaidyanath, Asha Yathiraj, Relation Between the Screening Checklist for Auditory Processing in Adults and Diagnostic Auditory Processing Test Performance, American Journal of Audiology, 10.1044/2021_AJA-20-00203, 30, 3, (688-702), (2021).
- Mitchell S. Sommers, Brent Spehar, Nancy Tye-Murray, Joel Myerson, Sandra Hale, Age Differences in the Effects of Speaking Rate on Auditory, Visual, and Auditory-Visual Speech Perception, Ear & Hearing, 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000776, 41, 3, (549-560), (2020).
- Estella P.-M. Ma, Michelle C.-K. Wu, Age estimation from voice in the Cantonese elderly population: influence of listener’s age and stimulus types, Speech, Language and Hearing, 10.1080/2050571X.2019.1634348, 23, 4, (243-249), (2019).
View Options
Sign In Options
ASHA member? If so, log in with your ASHA website credentials for full access.
Member Login