Recognition performance on words interrupted (10 ips, 50% duty cycle) with two interruption patterns referenced to word onset: Young listeners with normal hearing for pure tones and older listeners with sensorineural hearing loss

Objective: To determine in an interrupted word paradigm (Maryland CNCs; 10 ips, 50% duty cycle) if different locations of the interruption pattern produce different recognition performances. Design: Repeated measures using two interruption patterns that were complementary halves referenced to word onset; one started with word onset (0-ms), the other started 50 ms later. The hypothesis was that recognition performance would be better on the 0-ms condition than on the 50-ms condition, but there would be some words with the reverse relation. Study sample: Twenty-four young adults with normal hearing for pure tones and 32 older adults (mean = 67 years) with sensorineural hearing loss participated. Results: With the young listeners mean recognition performance on the 0-ms condition (63.1%) was significantly better than the mean performance on the 50-ms condition (47.8%). About twice as many words had better performance on the 0-ms condition. With the older listeners, who were given only stimuli on which performances were > 58% by the young normals, performances on the two conditions were the same. Conclusions: The hypothesis was supported with the young listeners. The equal performance by the older listeners on the two conditions was attributed to the manner in which the words were selected.