Auditory filtering and the discrimination of spectral shapes by normal and hearing-impaired subjects.
A review of the literature suggests that many hearing-impaired patients suffer from sensory deficits in addition to the reduced audibility of speech signals. Poor frequency resolution, or abnormal spread of masking, is a consistently identified deficit in sensorineural hearing loss. Frequency resolution was measured in individual subjects using the input filter pattern paradigm, and the minimum detectable amplitude of a second-formant spectral peak in a spectral-shape discrimination task was also determined for each subject. The two tasks were designed to test the identical frequency regions in each subject. A nearly perfect correlation was found between the degree of frequency resolution as measured by the input filter pattern and performance on the spectral-shape discrimination task. These results suggest that measures of frequency selectivity may offer predictive value as to the degree of impairment that individual hearing-impaired patients may have in perceiving the spectral characteristics of speech, and also lead to suggestions for signal processing strategies to aid these patients.
Institute for Sensory Research, Syracuse University, New York 13244.
C W
CW
Turner
L A
LA
Holte
E
E
Relkin
D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006801:Humans; D008838:Microcomputers; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D012984:Software; D013067:Speech Perception