title: Duration discrimination of speech and tonal complex stimuli by normally hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.
abstract: The ability to discriminate changes in the length of vowels and tonal complexes (filled intervals) and in the duration of closure in stop consonants and gaps in tonal complexes (unfilled intervals) was studied in three normally hearing and seven severely hearing-impaired listeners. The speech stimuli consisted of the vowels (i, I, u, U, a, A) and the consonants (p, t, k), and the tonal complexes consisted of digitally generated sinusoids at 0.5, 1, and 2 kHz. The signals were presented at conversational levels for each listener group, and a 3IFC adaptive procedure was used to estimate difference limens (DLs). The DLs for speech were similar to those for tonal complex stimuli in both the filled and unfilled conditions. Both normally and impaired-hearing listeners demonstrated greater acuity for changes in the duration of filled than unfilled intervals. Mean thresholds for filled intervals obtained from normally hearing listeners were smaller than those obtained from hearing-impaired listeners. For unfilled intervals, however, the difference between listener groups was not significant. A few hearing-impaired listeners demonstrated temporal acuity comparable to that of normally hearing listeners for several listening conditions. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to speech perception in normally and impaired-hearing individuals.
authors.affiliation: National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York 14623.
authors.forename: J H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Bochner
authors.forename: K B
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Snell
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: MacKenzie
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*