Impaired listeners' recognition of speech presented dichotically through high- and low-pass filters.
50-word phonetically balanced word lists were presented to hearing-impaired subjects dichotically, with the signal going to one ear high-pass filtered above 780 Hz, and the same signal simultaneously presented to the other ear through a low-pass filter with the same cutoff frequency. The performance with this split-signal presentation was compared to both unfiltered diotic and high-pass diotic presentations. The split-signal scheme did not show a significant advantage over both the unfiltered and high-pass diotic presentations in any of the 22 subjects tested; in 1 subject it showed a significant disadvantage. Group differences were near zero for 16 subjects tested at the presumed maximum of their performance-intensity function and showed only a weak (insignificant) advantage for the split-signal scheme over the unfiltered presentation when most comfortable level and the best of three filter cutoff frequencies were chosen individually for 6 subjects. The conclusion was drawn that the split-signal presentation neither increases nor decreases word recognition scores at relatively high levels in quiet in a predominantly older population.
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006311:Hearing Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D013067:Speech Perception