Aging and the Binaural Advantage in Reverberation and Noise

The consonant identification ability of younger normal-hearing adults and older adults with little or no peripheral hearing loss was assessed using monaural and binaural presentation in four listening conditions: quiet, noise, reverberation, and reverberation + noise. Performance was examined in terms of identification accuracy and amount of binaural advantage. Results suggest that the small amount of hearing loss in the older subjects limited their perception of distorted consonants. Neither age nor peripheral hearing loss was related strongly to the amount of benefit obtained from binaural presentation.