On the difficulty of fricative perception by hearing‐impaired subjects

Abstract

By comparing conditions under which both normal and hearing‐impaired subjects were presented with equivalent degrees of audibility for fricative perception, the current study isolated the factors of lack of audibility from that of loss of suprathreshold discriminability of fricative‐perception cues. One moderate and two severe cochlear‐impaired subjects identified synthetic fricatives, with either full cues (frication and transition) or frication cue alone, presented in closed‐set response tasks across a wide range of presentation levels. The results showed that hearing‐impaired subjects yielded equivalent recognition performance to the normals when given an equivalent degree of audibility for the frication cue, but they obtained poorer‐than‐normal performance if only given an equivalent degree of audibility for the transition cue. Considering the 20‐ to 25‐dB intensity difference between the frication and transition cues, the difficulty that hearing‐impaired subjects have in perceiving fricatives under normal circumstances may be due to two factors: the lack of audibility in terms of frication cue and the loss of discriminability in terms of transition cue. [Work supported by SU Senate Research Grant and Deafness Research Foundation.]