Abstract
Suprathreshold distortions in auditory processing contribute to speech recognition deficits for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners in noise. Outer hair cell damage and attendant reductions in frequency selectivity and peripheral compression may contribute to these deficits. Reduced sensitivity to spectral or temporal modulations or temporal fine structure (TFS) information may also play a role. Eight normal-hearing and 18 HI listeners were tested in psychoacoustic tasks to assess frequency selectivity (notched-noise), peripheral compression (temporal masking curves), TFS sensitivity [frequency modulation (FM) detection in the presence of random amplitude modulation], and spectrotemporal modulation (STM) sensitivity (spectral-temporal “ripple” detection). Performance was examined at 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz at several presentation levels. Listeners were also tested on sentence recognition in stationary and modulated noise (92-dB sound pressure level signal level; −6-, −3-, 0-, and +3-dB SNRs). HI listeners with similar audiometric thresholds showed a wide range of speech scores. Estimates of FM and STM sensitivity at 500 and 1000 Hz were significantly correlated with speech scores and with each other. Frequency selectivity and compression measures were not clearly associated with speech performance. Implications for models of HI speech intelligibility are discussed. [Work supported by the Oticon Foundation.]
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