Abstract
The effect of reduced spectral contrast on the speech‐reception threshold (SRT) for sentences in noise, and on phoneme identification, was investigated with 16 normal‐hearing subjects. The SRT increases—to about the same extent for a male as for a female voice—as spectral energy is smeared over bandwidths exceeding the ear's critical bandwidth. Phoneme identification shows that vowels are more susceptible to this type of processing than consonants. Vowels are primarily confused with the back vowels /ɔ,u/, and consonants are confused where place of articulation is concerned. In competing speech normal‐hearing subjects show a 6–8 dB lower SRT for sentences than in steady‐state noise, while sensorineurally hearing‐impaired subjects do not [J. M. Festen and R. Plomp, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88, 1725–1736 (1990)]. As frequency resolution may contribute to this effect, and as fluctuating interferences of speech are very common in daily situations, the extent of the threshold difference between noise and speech masker was investigated for a number of smearing bandwidths.
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