The use of subsegmental information in sentence comprehension with or without formant transitions by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Abstract

Using a noise replacement paradigm, Lee and Kewley-Port [J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 119, (2006)] examined sentence comprehension by young normal-hearing (YNH) and elderly hearing-impaired (EHI) listeners when sentences were processed to present only subsegmental information (i.e., either steady-state or formant transitions) in sentences processed in four different ways. Results showed that correct word responses by EHI listeners were more affected by the type of information in the four conditions compared to YNH listeners. To compare the use of subsegmental information between listener groups who were carefully matched for audibility and age, new analyses of correctly identified phonemes and different word-error patterns were made for both correct and incorrect word responses. Correlation analyses examined the relations among correct and incorrect word responses, phoneme scoring, hearing thresholds, and age. Despite a larger number of incorrect answers by EHI listeners, word-error patterns, as well as an ability to extract phonemes using subsegmental information, were similar between YNH and EHI listeners. Analyses for EHI listeners showed correct word responses were strongly correlated with correct phoneme identification and with hearing thresholds, but not with age. [Work supported by NIHDCD-02229.]