Frequency Discrimination Ability and Stop-Consonant Identification in Normally Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Subjects

Abstract

Identification of place of articulation in the synthesized syllables/bi/,/di/, and /gi/ was examined in three groups of listeners: (a) normal hearers, (b) subjects with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, and (c) normally hearing subjects listening in noise. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition (moving-F2 stimuli) were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constant (straight-F2 stimuli) to examine the importance of the F2 transition in stop-consonant perception. For straight-F2 stimuli, burst spectrum and F2 frequency were appropriate for the syllable involved. Syllable duration also was a variable, with formant durations of 10, 19, 28, and 44 ms employed. All subjects' identification performance improved as stimulus duration increased. The groups were equivalent in terms of their identification of /di/ and /gi/ syllables, whereas the hearing-impaired and noise-masked normal listeners showed impaired performance for/bi/, particularly for the straight-F2 version. No difference in performance among groups was seen for /di/ and /gi/ stimuli for moving-F2 and straight-F2 versions. Second-formant frequency discrimination measures suggested that subjects' discrimination abilities were not acute enough to take advantage of the formant transition in the /di/and /gi/stimuli.

Effect of relative and overall amplitude on perception of voiceless stop consonants by listeners with normal and impaired hearing

“…7 and 8 suggest that NMNH listeners' use of disparate cues (relative amplitude and formant transitions) may be altered by the presence of masking noise when speech is near threshold. In some cases, the NMNH listeners performed more poorly than HI listeners in quiet, a result consistent with data reported by Humes et al (1987) and Ochs et al (1989). The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that audibility and recruitment, as simulated by noise masking, do not explain the results from the listeners with hearing impairment.…”

“…The fact that some of the HI listeners could not fully use formant transition cues is not completely explained by audibility, either. One explanation for the disparity of formant transition cue use could be that individual Previous studies comparing the results of NMNH and HI listeners on speech perception tasks have found a range of results, from better performance by NMNH listeners (Milner, 1982) to mixed results between the two groups (Fabry and Van Tasell, 1986) to equivalent or better performance by HI listeners (Humes et al, 1987;Zurek and Delhorne, 1987;Ochs et al, 1989;Dubno and Schaefer, 1992). Most of these studies used multifilters to spectrally shape the noise to match thresholds of NMNH listeners to those of HI listeners across a wide range of frequencies.…”

Aided and Unaided Speech Perception by Older Hearing Impaired Listeners

“…Unaided deficits were relatively small for consonants whose identification is based on lower frequency cues (e.g., /ʧ/, /r/, /ʃ/, and /ʤ/), and aided thresholds returned to near-normal levels, consistent with the substantial amplification of 2–4 kHz frequencies. However, in accord with previous studies[ 10 , 12 , 15 ], unaided OHI listeners exhibited greater difficulties in identifying consonants that depend on high-frequency spectrotemporal cues [ 4 , 5 , 61 , 62 ], including stop consonants [ 63 ], sibilants [ 64 ], and non-sibilant fricatives. The identification of these consonants was only partially normalized by HAs.…”

The effect of tinnitus on some psychoacoustical abilities in individuals with normal hearing sensitivity

“…The perception of these psychoacoustic abilities plays an important role in the speech perception in noise. Frequency discrimination ability helps in the perception of stop consonants and in understanding frequency transition 16 . Intensity discrimination ability is important in understanding just noticeable differences in formants and in the discrimination of peak to valley differences in intensity.…”