Abstract
The present investigation sought to establish empirical evidence for the audiological observation that listeners with normal pure-tone thresholds below 2000 Hz and selective high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss often experience great difficulty perceiving speech in a noise background. For patients with either noise trauma or presbyacusis, masked-speech intelligibility thresholds (S/N) were about 10 dB higher than for normal observers. In an effort to provide a psycho-acoustical explanation for the speech communication deficit, pure-tone masking patterns were measured. Relative to the normal control group, listeners with high-frequency hearing loss showed as much as 30 dB more upward spread of masking, often in frequency regions of normal pure-tone threshold. The strong positive relationship between the masked-speech intelligibility threshold and the upward spread of masking suggests that it may be possible to predict the patient's speech perception handicap in noise from audiometric measurements of masked threshold. Implications of the present work for development of close-talking-microphone hearing aids will be discussed. [Work supported by an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to the author at the Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.]
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