This study compared the speech recognition performance of 4 groups of 10 adults--young listeners with either normal or impaired hearing and elderly listeners with either normal or impaired hearing. Age effects were observed primarily in multiple degradation conditions featuring time compression of the stimuli. Results suggest a change in…

This experiment sought to define a confidence limit for maximum word-recognition scores obtained from 212 young and elderly adults with confirmed cochlear hearing loss. A 95% confidence limit was found and supported through analysis, although it is suggested that, in some cases, word recognition should be measured at additional levels to obtain…

A study involving 14 stutterers (mean age 20.7 years) was conducted to determine the effect of sentence length on the frequency of stuttering. (Author/SBH)

Psychometric functions (PFD) for the detection of pure tones were obtained from 10 adolescent and young adult listeners with normal hearing and 10 adult listeners with sensorineural impairments of presumed cochlear origin. The slopes of the PFDs were abnormally steep in some of the hearing-impaired listeners but were statistically significant only…

The speech of 12 adults in prolonged speech treatment was assessed prior to treatment and after discharge. Results showed that stuttering was eliminated without using unusually slow or unnatural speech patterns, and many clients maintained stutter-free speech at high rates of speech. Speech rate correlated to perceived posttreatment speech…

Comparison of the formant frequencies of 15 adult stutterers' fluent and disfluent vowels and of stutterers' and nonstutterers' fluent vowels indicated that differences (between stutterers and nonstutterers) could be accounted for by differences in vocal tract dimensions. No differences were found between frequencies of fluent and disfluent vowels…

Evaluation of the /a/ and /i/ sounds of 51 adult subjects with various laryngeal disorders indicated that spectrographic noise and curvilinear derivatives of the period standard deviation provided the best predictions of disorder severity. (Author/DB)