Investigation of word recognition for the elderly in speech and noise spatial separation

In present study, subjective Chinese Mandarin word recognitions were carried out by 10 elderly listeners aged more than 60 years old in three rooms of a nursing house under the different reverberation time (RT), different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and different azimuth of noise conditions. The results showed that word recognition scores of the elderly increased with the increase of SNR and the spatial separation azimuth between speech and noise, and decreased with the increase of RT. The improvements of word recognition scores for spatial separation azimuth between speech and noise from 0° to 45° were more than those from 45° to 90° in all three rooms for the elderly. There was a great difference in the word recognition scores of hearing impairment elderly and normal hearing elderly under low SNR conditions and the difference decreased with the increase of SNR. The difference in the word recognition scores between hearing impairment participants and normal hearing participants also became smaller when the target speech and noise was spatially separated.