Relationship between psychoacoustics and ‘‘say–stay’’ identification in hearing-impaired listeners.

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The relationship between gap detection, glide discrimination, and identification of synthesized speech stimuli as more like ‘‘say’’ or more like ‘‘stay’’ was investigated in 18 listeners with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Speech stimuli were patterned after Best, Morrongiello, and Robson’s (1981) ‘‘say–stay’’ identification task, which involved the listeners’ use of silent gap (between signal-to-noise and vocalic portions of the signals) and first formant onset frequency, both indicating the presence or absence of stop consonants. A significant effect of hearing impairment was found on the gap detection and glide discrimination tasks, and on the identification functions of the ‘‘say–stay’’ stimuli. However, the speech identification functions were not correlated with the psychoacoustic results. In fact, the identification performance suggested listeners with mild to moderate hearing impairments were using weaker spectral cues than the normal-hearing listeners, which is contradictory to what is predicted by reduced spectral and temporal resolution abilities.