DOI: 10.1044/2026_jslhr-25-00861 ISSN: 1092-4388

Intelligibility of Emotional Speech in Chinese Older Adults: Effects of Age-Related Hearing Loss

Xinran Fan, Jing Zhang, Minhui Cai, Jiayi Wu, Runci Wang, Jingjing Guan, Hongwei Ding
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Purpose:

The intelligibility of speech with emotional prosody may decline with aging and hearing loss. In Mandarin Chinese, both lexical tone and emotional prosody rely on pitch variations, raising the possibility that emotional prosody modulates speech intelligibility. This study examined the effects of aging and age-related hearing loss on word recognition for Mandarin words spoken with different emotional prosodies.

Method:

Four groups participated: older adults with normal hearing (ONH; n = 35, 60–86 years of age), older adults with mild–moderate hearing loss (OHL; n = 22, 61–83 years of age), younger adults with normal hearing (YNH; n = 29, 18–20 years of age), and younger adults with simulated hearing loss (YSHL; n = 31, 19–28 years of age). Normal hearing was defined as a four-frequency pure-tone average (PTA4) ≤ 25 dB HL; OHL participants had a PTA4 of 25–40 dB HL. No participants used hearing aids. Stimuli were semantically neutral disyllabic words produced with five emotional prosodies (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and neutrality), presented binaurally at a fixed level of 65 dB SPL.

Results:

Word recognition accuracy was significantly lower for OHL and YSHL than for ONH and YNH, and ONH performed worse than YNH. Neutral prosody yielded the highest word recognition accuracy, followed by sad prosody; happy, angry, and fearful prosodies produced lower word recognition accuracy. At the level of syllabic component, lexical tones were recognized most accurately, followed by finals and then initials. Among older adults, high-frequency pure-tone average was the only significant predictor of word recognition.

Conclusions:

Both aging and age-related hearing loss negatively impact emotional speech intelligibility in Mandarin. Lexical tones were more resilient than segmental components, and high-frequency hearing sensitivity was a key predictor of performance for older adults. These results underscore the importance of considering emotional prosody and tonal characteristics when assessing speech perception in aging populations.

Supplemental Material:

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33106883

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