Intelligibility of interrupted speech in listeners of different age and hearing status

In most real-world communicative environments speech signals are fragmented and incomplete due to masking by other concurrent sounds. Experiments in the perception of gated and time-compressed speech provide a useful approach for systematically investigating factors involved in the perception of temporally-fragmented speech. In the current work, the intelligibility of spoken sentences was measured following periodic signal interruption at various square-wave gating rates with time compression applied by either omitting or doubling silent intervals during gated-off times. Across interruption rates (0.5 - 16 Hz), speech perception of younger and older normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired adults was similar for slow interruption rates, but differed substantially for the faster rates. This rate-dependent variation was consistently found for different interruption methods and conditions. Importantly, speech perception at fast interruption rates correlated strongly with pure-tone thresholds and performance...