Discrimination of release time constants in hearing-aid compressors.
We examined the ability of twenty-five hearing-impaired and eight normal-hearing listeners to discriminate between release time constants used for compression in hearing aids. The compressor was a standard three-channel system. The stimuli were normal and 'vocoded' sentences from a male and female database. In agreement with other studies looking at different outcomes, performance varied greatly across individuals. This variation was greater in hearing-impaired listeners, for whom the discriminability of a release time of 5 ms from one of 5000 ms (with the attack time fixed at 5 ms) ranged from chance to perfect. This variability was not significantly related to hearing impairment nor to individuals' compression ratios.
Gilbert
Gaëtan
G
MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, UK. Gaetan.Gilbert@ens.fr
Akeroyd
Michael A
MA
Gatehouse
Stuart
S
D000328:Adult; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006311:Hearing Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013997:Time Factors