The implication is that there are factors specifically associated with the aging process that contribute to the speech perception problems of elderly people.
Related work is conducted at the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging.
This research program is concerned primarily with normal aspects of human aging in relation to auditory function and risk factors that contribute to apparent age-related hearing loss. Age-related cognitive changes appear to affect speech understanding performance. For example, selected tasks that increase cognitive demand are sensitive to age effects. In addition, elderly listeners employ a more risky response criterion than younger listeners on speech recognition measures. Thus, elderly listeners may not understand a message but respond as if they did understand it, which leads to communicative dysfunction.