The Effect of Age-Related Hearing Loss on Perception of Age-Related Dysphonia

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of different degrees of sensory and metabolic-sensory hearing loss on the perception of breathiness, roughness, and strain in aging voices. Four voices identified as normal, breathy, rough/strained, and rough by an expert panel were filtered through the HELPSV2 (Sensimetrics Corporation, Gloucester, MA) hearing loss simulator to create seven distinct hearing patterns per sample. Descriptive acoustic analysis was conducted to examine differences in spectrograms, long-term average spectra (LTAS) and smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) across voice and hearing loss profiles. Twenty naïve listeners judged the voice quality of each of 28 unique samples on a visual analog scale anchored with the labels “terrible voice quality” and “excellent voice quality.” Data were analyzed using a General Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) and post-hoc comparisons of significant findings. We did not find significant differences in perceptual ratings across any degree of sensory or metabolic-sensory hearing loss for breathy, rough/strained, or rough voices. Metabolic-sensory hearing loss resulted in significantly poorer perceived voice quality than sensory hearing loss for the normal voice, although degree of hearing loss did not significantly impact ratings. These findings provide preliminary evidence that metabolic-sensory age-related hearing loss may distort perception of voice quality, potentially due to a relative reduction in amplitude of harmonic energy in the sample. Future research with larger listener pools is required to further investigate these relationships.