title: The effect of hearing impairment on the identification of speech that is modulated synchronously or asynchronously across frequency.
abstract: This study investigated the effect of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss on the ability to identify speech in noise for vowel-consonant-vowel tokens that were either unprocessed, amplitude modulated synchronously across frequency, or amplitude modulated asynchronously across frequency. One goal of the study was to determine whether hearing-impaired listeners have a particular deficit in the ability to integrate asynchronous spectral information in the perception of speech. Speech tokens were presented at a high, fixed sound level and the level of a speech-shaped noise was changed adaptively to estimate the masked speech identification threshold. The performance of the hearing-impaired listeners was generally worse than that of the normal-hearing listeners, but the impaired listeners showed particularly poor performance in the synchronous modulation condition. This finding suggests that integration of asynchronous spectral information does not pose a particular difficulty for hearing-impaired listeners with mild/moderate hearing losses. Results are discussed in terms of common mechanisms that might account for poor speech identification performance of hearing-impaired listeners when either the masking noise or the speech is synchronously modulated.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA. jwh@med.unc.edu
authors.forename: Joseph W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Hall
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Buss
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Grose
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000523:psychology*; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech / Q000523:psychology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors