Recognition Performance of Interrupted Monosyllabic Words: The Effects of Ten Interruption Locations

Abstract

First, some words (utterances of those words) were immune to any differential effects of the ten interruption patterns. These words with flat performance functions constituted 46% of the word corpus. Second, 49% of the words exhibited U-shaped performance functions that were always systematic, going from maximum to minimum and back to maximum. These words were thought to be more dependent on the initial consonant to attain maximum performance. The conclusion is that some words are not affected by the location of the interruption pattern (those with flat functions) whereas other words are substantially affected (those with U-shaped functions).

Interrupted Monosyllabic Words: The Effects of Ten Interruption Locations on Recognition Performance by Older Listeners with Sensorineural Hearing Loss

“…In Figure 3A, the mean data and the SDs for the words are depicted (squares) with the dashed line representing the mean performance on the uninterrupted words. For comparison, the mean performances by 24 young listeners with normal hearing for pure tones are shown for the same onset conditions (gray circles; Wilson and Hamm, 2015). (Throughout the Results and Discussion section, unless otherwise noted, reference to interrupted word data on young adults with normal hearing is from Wilson and Hamm [2015].)…”

“…For comparison, the mean performances by 24 young listeners with normal hearing for pure tones are shown for the same onset conditions (gray circles; Wilson and Hamm, 2015). (Throughout the Results and Discussion section, unless otherwise noted, reference to interrupted word data on young adults with normal hearing is from Wilson and Hamm [2015].) In Figure 3B, the data for the individual participants in each onset condition are shown (small circles) against a backdrop of the mean data.…”

“…The shape of the psychometric function in which onset condition was the independent variable was evaluated further by examining the functions for each word, the means for which are listed in Supplemental Table S2, and illustrated in Supplemental Figures S2-S8. In the Wilson and Hamm (2015) study, categorizing the psychometric functions for each word into flat and U-shaped categories was accomplished visually as almost all of the functions were systematic. The word functions established on the listeners with sensorineural hearing loss in the current study were somewhat systematic but often compounded with a noise component.…”

“…The development of these interrupted materials, which were from the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (Tillman and Carhart, 1966;Department of Veterans Affairs, 2010), is described in detail by Wilson and Hamm (2015). The mean word duration was 487 msec (standard deviation [SD] 5 77 msec) that provided most words four to five glimpses when interrupted.…”

“…Subsequently, the issue of interruption pattern location in the target word was explored in detail for 24 young adults with so-called normal hearing for pure tones by incrementing the temporal location of the interruption pattern in 10-msec steps, which produced ten onset conditions from 0 to 90 msec (Wilson and Hamm, 2015). From that study, two shapes of the psychometric functions across the ten sequential onset conditions emerged for 66 of the 70 words, flat (32 words) and U-shaped (34 words).…”