Voiced Stop Consonant Discrimination With Multichannel Expansion Hearing Loss Simulations
E. William Yund, Thomas R. Crain · 2019
An accurate simulation of sensorineural hearing loss would facilitate both the theoretical and the empirical development of better hearing aids. The variability among normal-hearing subjects’ results for the same simulated hearing loss sometimes seemed quite large. In comparison to speech-identification results, consonant discrimination results should provide a clearer perspective on the effect of the cochlear hearing impairment on the transmission of speech information through the cochlea, and on the ability of a signal-processing algorithm to simulate that cochlear impairment. Consonant discrimination was measured with a same-different procedure in which one trial included five vowel-consonant-vowels with the same vowel, the first four of which always had the same consonant and the fifth had either the same or a different consonant. High-pass filtering of the multichannel expansion hearing-loss simulations was needed to produce this subject’s unusual pattern of discriminations in the normal-hearing subjects.