Abstract
This study explored differences in CVV perception in two groups of Thai listeners: with normal hearing and with sensorineural hearing loss (with/without hearing aids). All participants chose one response in each of 210 Thai stimulus rhyming pairs, e.g., /taa/-/naa/. The rhyming monosyllabic words share an /aa/ vowel and mid tone, but differ in their initial phonemes (symmetrically distributed across 21 phonemes). While all stimuli for the normal hearing group were embedded in 4 signal-to-noise ratio levels, clean stimuli were presented to the patients. Comparisons of confusion patterns and perceptual distance were made. In both groups, /r/ is the most confusable phoneme, while /w/ is among the least. Perceptual representations of initial phonemes show five individual clusters: glide, glottal constriction, nasality, aspirated obstruent, and a combination of liquid and unaspirated obstruent. Patients' perceptual difficulty could be attributed to the nasality grouping, which is normally well separated, shifting closer to the glottal constrictions and aspirated obstruents. Hearing aids seem to improve perception of all phonemes by 10%, with /kh/ and /h/ showing the highest improvement rate, and /d/ the lowest. The instruments are beneficial in moving the nasality cluster further away from the nearby groupings.
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