title: Within-consonant perceptual differences in the hearing impaired ear.
abstract: The consonant recognition of 17 ears with sensorineural hearing loss is evaluated for 14 consonants /p, t, k, f, s, ∫, b, d, g, v, z, 3, m, n/+/a/, under four speech-weighted noise conditions (0, 6, 12 dB SNR, quiet). One male and one female talker were chosen for each consonant, resulting in 28 total consonant-vowel test tokens. For a given consonant, tokens by different talkers were observed to systematically differ, in both the robustness to noise and/or the resulting confusion groups. Such within-consonant token differences were observed for over 60% of the tested consonants and all HI ears. Only when HI responses are examined on an individual token basis does one find that the error may be limited to a small subset of tokens with confusion groups that are restricted to fewer than three confusions on average. Averaging different tokens of the same consonant can raise the entropy of a listener's responses (i.e., the size of the confusion group), causing the listener to appear to behave in a less systematic way. Quantifying these token differences provides insight into HI perception of speech under noisy conditions and characterizes each listener's hearing impairment.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. atrevin2@illinois.edu
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Trevino
authors.forename: Jont B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Allen
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D046088:Hearing Loss, Unilateral / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013069:Speech Reception Threshold Test