Discrimination and identification of environmental sounds among people with hearing impairment

Abstract

We report that people with hearing impairment (HI) can better discriminate environmental sounds than identifying the same sounds. In order to investigate the perception/recognition of environmental sounds by people with HI, researchers often choose identification task as a measurement tool. However, since identification ability is developed upon discrimination ability, the discrimination ability should be studied too. We used 9 environmental sounds as stimuli for both discrimination and identification tasks, and 16 participants with HI joined the experiment. In the discrimination task, the participants listened to the paired short stimuli, and reported the perceived difference. In the identification task, the participants listened to each stimulus and reported the name of the sound source. The order of discrimination and identification tasks is counterbalanced among the participants, and we also tested 10 people with normal hearing for comparison. The results showed a clear contrast between the discrimina...