Efficiency of selective listening by normal‐hearing and hearing‐impaired listeners

Abstract

A COSS analysis procedure [B. G. J. Berg, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88, 149–158 (1990)] was used to estimate the efficiency with which 15 normal‐hearing and 15 hearing‐impaired listeners detected a level increment in a target tone embedded in a multitone complex. The complex was comprised of 6 oct frequencies from 250–8000 Hz and the target tone was selected as either the 250‐, 1000‐, or 4000‐Hz tone. The hearing‐impaired listeners had moderate, sloping, high‐frequency sensorineural hearing impairments. Two efficiency measures were used to account for the listeners’ less than ideal performance on the task; weighting efficiency (ηwgt), which measures how well the listener attends to or weighs the target, and noise efficiency (ηnoise), which accounts for all other factors unrelated to weights. Weighting efficiencies were significantly higher for hearing‐impaired listeners than normal‐hearing listeners for the 4000‐Hz target, which was in the region of hearing loss. No significant ηwgt differences between normal‐hearing and hearing‐impaired listeners were observed for the other two target tones. Even though hearing‐impaired listeners sometimes weighted information more efficiently than normal‐hearing listeners their overall performance on the task was significantly poorer as was reflected by smaller values of ηnoise.