Susceptibility to spread of masking in normal and sensorineural hearing‐impaired listeners

Abstract

To determine whether upward spread of masking is responsible for failure to identify stop consonant place of articulation, sensorineural hearing‐impaired subjects grouped according to etiological basis of hearing disorder were tested on a speech and a nonspeech task. Two‐formant consonant ‐ vowel syllables varying along a /b d g/ continuum were presented for identification at moderate and high intensity when formant amplitudes were equal and when F1 amplitude was attenuated by 6, 12, and 18 dB. In the second experiment, noise‐on‐tone masking functions were generated using seven narrow bands of noise at moderate and high intensity. Upward spread of masking could be demonstrated in speech and nonspeech tasks, irrespective of the subjects' age, audiometric configuration, or etiology of hearing impairment. Attenuation of F1 produced varying results on phoneme labelling performance among groups. The outcome of these experiments showed that while listeners with noise‐induced hearing loss showed substantial impr...