ABSTRACT
As the size of the older adult population continues to grow, so too does the need
to better understand the complex effects of aging on everyday listening tasks involving
binaural and spatial hearing. It is well known that older individuals with and without
hearing loss often complain of difficulty hearing and understanding speech. In this
article the results of recent studies evaluating the effects of aging on various binaural
and spatial tasks are summarized and discussed, and an attempt is made to identify
the difficulties encountered in daily living by older adults because of problems processing
binaural and spatial information. The results of most of the studies reviewed here
indicate that the ability of older listeners to localize sound sources, to obtain
a gain in speech intelligibility in noise when speech and noise sources are separated,
to improve the detection of signals in noise by using binaural cues (as measured with
a masking level difference task), and to discriminate interaural differences in time
and intensity decline with increasing age. These decreases in performance on binaural
and spatial tasks are generally observed even when the effects of hearing loss are
taken into account.
KEYWORD
Aging - localization - speech intelligibility gain - binaural - spatial
