Speech perception in gated noise: The effects of spectral and temporal resolution and auditory streaming

Abstract

Hearing-impaired (HI) listeners often report difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise, even in the presence of mild degrees of hearing loss. In addition, HI listeners show significantly less benefit from fluctuations in noise than do normal hearing (NH) listeners. Furthermore, HI listeners often show less accuracy of processing frequency and temporal information in acoustic signals and grouping them into a whole meaningful speech. The purpose of this study is to examine differences in performances of NH and HI listeners for speech perception in various types of noise. Three hypotheses will be examined in this study. First, the amount of masking release in HI listeners with mild hearing loss will be smaller than in NH listeners even when speech and noise are presented at intensities sufficient to overcome the hearing loss. Masking release will be measured for consonant recognition and sentence recognition by subtracting the percent correct in steady noise from that in gated noise. Second, the performance of HI listeners on spectral resolution, temporal resolution, and auditory streaming tasks will be significantly poorer than that of NH listeners. Third, the performance differences in these tasks may account for differences in masking release.