Duration discrimination in younger and older adults

Ten normal hearing young adults and ten older adults were asked to identify the longer of two sequentially presented tones. The duration of the standard tones ranged from 1.5 ms to 1000 ms across blocks. Duration discrimination was not related to audiometric thresholds. These results show that older adults are much more disadvantaged than young adults when discriminating very short durations (i.e., below 40 ms) that are characteristic of speech sounds, and that this disadvantage cannot be accounted for by hearing levels