Early-elderly listeners show temporal sensitivity decline before audiometric loss appears.

Evidence

The present study extends our earlier study (Ochi et al. 2014 ) by incorporating early-elderly listeners under essentially the same experimental settings. We adopted early-elderly listeners because generally they would exhibit deteriorated sensitivities to temporal structures of stimuli, while their audiometric thresholds remain within a normal to mildely-impaired range. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1029

Categorization

• DEFINE: Early-elderly here operationally means people whose temporal-structure sensitivities have begun to decline while their hearing thresholds are still near-normal — a useful working definition.