Variations Within Normal Hearing Acuity and Speech Comprehension: An Exploratory Study.

Purpose Many young adults with a mild hearing loss can appear unaware or unconcerned about their loss or its potential effects. A question that has not been raised in prior research is whether slight variability, even within the range of clinically normal hearing, may have a detrimental effect on comprehension of spoken sentences, especially when attempting to understand the meaning of sentences that offer an additional cognitive challenge. The purpose of this study was to address this question.

The possible role of brain rhythms in perceiving fast speech: Evidence from adult aging.

The rhythms of speech and the time scales of linguistic units (e.g., syllables) correspond remarkably to cortical oscillations.