Abstract
In an effort to evaluate the importance of envelope cues in speech recognition, response times and percentages of correct responses were measured simultaneously in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, using a forced-choice identification paradigm. Naturally produced /aCa/ disyllables presented in a white noise background (+6 dB signal-to-noise ratio) were used to create temporal-only stimuli having instantaneous amplitudes identical to the natural speech stimuli, but flat spectra. The temporal envelope of the /aCa/ disyllables was either left intact or enhanced by raising it to the power 2. In the first experiment, 13 young normal-hearing listeners (24–27 years) were tested. The results show that envelope enhancement yields a general improvement in both percent correct identification (4.75%) and response times (63 ms). In the second experiment, nine hearing-impaired listeners (53–71 years) were tested at a comfortable listening level. Overall, temporal expansion fails to show better consonant identification in terms of percentage of correct responses, but yields a significant improvement (66 ms) in terms of response time. These results suggest that: (1) the perceptual effects of speech-envelope enhancement cannot be completely accounted for by percent correct-responses measurements, and (2) response times seem to be more sensitive to the effects of envelope enhancement.
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