Understanding of time-compressed speech by older adults: effect of discard interval.

Fifteen subjects, aged 60 to 74 years, participated in a study to assess the role of discard interval (DI) length in the understanding of time-compressed connected speech by older adults. The subjects' task was to report associations among the items mentioned in a passage. Results indicate that performance deteriorated gradually until a critical DI of 75 msec was reached, beyond which performance dropped sharply. Results should help in the better understanding of speech perception by older listeners and may be useful in development of a standardized test for evaluating speech understanding in older individuals whose auditory complaints are often not explained by their peripheral hearing loss.