Localization and binaural detection with monaural and binaural amplification
Janet Koehnke, Patrick M. Zurek · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1990
As part of a study comparing the effects of monaural and binaural amplification, localization and binaural detection was measured for two groups of listeners with bilateral, sensorineural hearing losses. The subjects in one group have moderate-to-severe, flat losses; the subjects in the other group have moderate-to-severe, high-frequency losses. Masking level differences (MLDs) were obtained using speech-spectrum noise maskers and octave-band speech-spectrum noise targets. Localization in the horizontal plane (nine locations from − 90 to + 90 deg) was measured using three-word phrases in an anechoic and a reverberant environment. Both binaural detection and localization performance vary between subject groups and within subject groups, and all subjects generally have smaller MLDs and poorer localization than normal-hearing listeners. The subjects with flat hearing losses usually have better localization and detection with binaural amplification than monaural amplification, and the high-frequency hearing-loss subjects tend to have better overall performance than the flat hearing-loss listeners. The data for all the subjects combined show a tendency for RMS errors in localization to decrease as MLDs increase. [Work supported by NIH.]