We describe an experiment to show how the comprehensibility of speech
over the telephone is related to the age of the listener. Our
intention is to show figures to prove the commonly-held belief that as
we get older our hearing of information over the telephone degrades.
The study was set up to determine, for all age groups from 20-29 to
80-89, whether comprehension degrades with age and with the type of
speech (synthetic or natural). We gave subjects sentences containing
target word pairs that they were to write down. The pairs contained
more or less predictable words.
Our findings, which we consider to be preliminary due to the sample size,
show degradation of comprehension with age and degradation from natural
speech to synthetic speech.
