Frequency discrimination ability and stop-consonant identification in normally hearing and hearing-impaired subjects.
Identification of place of articulation in the synthesized syllables /bi/, /di/, and /gi/ was examined in three groups of listeners: (a) normal hearers, (b) subjects with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, and (c) normally hearing subjects listening in noise. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition (moving-F2 stimuli) were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constant (straight-F2 stimuli) to examine the importance of the F2 transition in stop-consonant perception. For straight-F2 stimuli, burst spectrum and F2 frequency were appropriate for the syllable involved. Syllable duration also was a variable, with formant durations of 10, 19, 28, and 44 ms employed. All subjects' identification performance improved as stimulus duration increased. The groups were equivalent in terms of their identification of /di/ and /gi/ syllables, whereas the hearing-impaired and noise-masked normal listeners showed impaired performance for /bi/, particularly for the straight-F2 version. No difference in performance among groups was seen for /di/ and /gi/ stimuli for moving-F2 and straight-F2 versions. Second-formant frequency discrimination measures suggested that subjects' discrimination abilities were not acute enough to take advantage of the formant transition in the /di/ and /gi/ stimuli.
Ochs
M T
MT
Radford University.
Humes
L E
LE
Ohde
R N
RN
Grantham
D W
DW
D000328:Adult; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology*; D006316:Hearing Loss, High-Frequency / Q000523:psychology*; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors