Modulation masking within and across carriers for subjects with normal and impaired hearing

Abstract

Sid Bacon was a pioneer in studies of the extent to which the detection of target amplitude modulation (AM) of a carrier is affected by additional (masker) amplitude modulation applied to the same carrier (within-channel modulation masking) or to a different carrier (across-channel modulation masking). Here, these two types of modulation masking were compared for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects. The target was either 4-Hz or 16-Hz sinusoidal AM of a 4000-Hz carrier. The target AM depth was fixed. The masker AM was applied either to the same carrier or to a carrier at 3179 or 2518 Hz. The masker AM rate was 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, or 4 times the target rate. The masker AM depth was varied adaptively to determine the value needed just to mask the target AM. Preliminary results indicate that within-channel modulation-masking patterns are similar for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects, suggesting that the hypothetical modulation filters are not affected by hearing loss. However, the amount of across-channel modulation masking is lower for normal-hearing than for hearing-impaired subjects, presumably because of the reduced frequency selectivity of the latter. The increased across-channel masking for the hearing-impaired subjects may contribute to their difficulties in understanding speech in background sounds.