Dichotic Word Recognition in Young and Older Adults

Dichotic word recognition was evaluated in free-recall, directed-attention right, and directed-attention left response conditions. All participants were right-handed and included a group of young adults with normal hearing and two groups of older adults with sensorineural hearing loss. Dichotic word recognition performance was best for young adults and decreased for each older group. A right-ear advantage (REA) was observed for all groups. REAs observed in the older groups were larger than those for the young adults, resulting from a greater deficit in dichotic word recognition performance for words presented to the left ear. A subset of older adults exhibited few to no responses (≤3/100) for the left ear for all response conditions, which may relate to a compromise in auditory processing. The results support an age-related disadvantage in recognition performance for dichotic stimuli presented to the left ear not entirely accounted for by differences in hearing sensitivity between subject groups.