The effect of voice cuing on releasing speech from informational masking disappears in older adults.

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether older adults can use voice information to unmask speech. DESIGN Under a voice-priming condition, before a target-speech sentence was presented with a noise or speech masker, one or two voice-priming sentences were recited with the same voice reciting the target sentence. Eighteen younger adults and 12 older adults with clinically normal hearing were instructed to loudly repeat the target sentence. RESULTS Presenting the voice-priming sentence(s) improved target-speech identification only when the masker was speech in younger adults but not older adults. CONCLUSION For older adults, the inability to use voice information to reduce informational masking contributes to their speech-recognition difficulties in "cocktail-party" environments.