In Brief:
Many individuals experience declining hearing sensitivity and diminished auditory word recognition skills with advancing age. We previously demonstrated that vision-only word recognition also tends to decline over time. In this experiment, we determined whether older individuals who have hearing loss, retain their vision-only word recognition and their audiovisual integration skills to a greater extent than do older individuals who do not experience hearing loss. Older participants with normal hearing and older participants with mild-to-moderate hearing loss completed consonant, word, and sentence tests under three conditions, auditory-only, vision-only, and auditory-plus-vision. For each participant, audiovisual integration for each of the three types of test stimuli was computed, using a new formula. On average, the two groups of participants demonstrated similar vision-only speech recognition performance and similar audiovisual integration performance.
