Temporal patterning in the perception of spectrally ambiguous speech by deaf and normal listeners

Abstract

It has been suggested [D. H. Klatt. J. Acoust, Soc. Am. 64, S114(A) (1976): L. A. Streeter, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 1582–1592 (1979)] that temporal information in speech independently influences syntactic analysis. Under conditions of high spectral ambiguity such as is present in severe sensorineural deafness this temporal pattern analysis might be a primary cue for speech perception. The perception of nonlinguistic temporal patterns by deaf and normal subjects was investigated for the visual, auditory, and auditory‐visual modalities using a matching paradigm. These data were compared to data from the same S's regarding their single modal and multimodal perception of speech under conditions of high spectral ambiguity (700‐Hz low‐pass filtering and modulated white noise). The ability to quickly and accurately perceive nonlinguistic temporal analogs of speech was found to be significantly correlated with the ability to comprehend degraded speech. The correlation was particularly marked for the auditory only condition in the right ear across all subjects. Significant effects were found for age, use of vision and hearing aid usage history of deaf subjects. No similar effects were noted for normal subjects.