Consonant recognition in noise: sensorineural loss

Abstract

Consonant recognition in quiet and noise was studied for 18 outpatient listeners who had moderate sensorineural losses. The 16 consonants were presented in a CV context, using three different vowels. Each subject heard 10 lists of 96 nonsense syllables for each condition. Syllables were presented monaurally at approximately 100 dB SPL, noise at 95 dB SPL. For these conditions of signal and noise level, the performance of normally hearing college students (n = 4) was reduced from 90% to 55% correct recognition by the addition of the noise and that of outpatient listeners with normal hearing (n = 6) from 70% to 45% correct recognition. For the 18 listeners with moderate sensorineural losses, the performance of nine was not affected adversely by addition of the noise and that of only five showed a decrement comparable to that seen in normals. The trend was for listeners with low performance in quiet to do as well in noise as they had done in quiet. These results required the use of forced-choice method, as opposed to the write-down technique used in earlier studies, which suggested that listeners with sensorineural loss are more adversely affected by noise than are normals. The present results suggest that the effects of sensorineural loss on speech recognition might be comparable to those of masking noise. [Supported by Public Health Service Award NS 07790.]