Ka. Doherty et Ra. Lutfi, SPECTRAL WEIGHTS FOR OVERALL LEVEL DISCRIMINATION IN LISTENERS WITH SENSORINEURAL HEARING-LOSS, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99(2), 1996, pp. 1053-1058
A conditional-on-a-single-stimulus (COSS) analysis procedure [B. G. Be
rg, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 1743-1746 (1989)] was used to measure the
weight or relative reliance that normal-hearing and hearing-impaired l
isteners give to different frequencies in the discrimination of the ov
erall level of a multitone complex. On each trial, two multitone-tone
complexes comprised of six octave frequencies from 250 to 8000 Hz were
presented to subjects. The levels of the frequencies for each complex
were randomly varied. The listeners task was to identify the complex
with the higher overall intensity level. Normal-hearmg listeners used
a variety of listening strategies to perform the task, showing no gene
ral preference to weight one component over another. Hearing-impaired
listeners, however, showed a general tendency to give greatest weight
to the spectral information in the region of their hearing loss. Thirt
een of the 14 hearing-impaired listeners, all of whom had a high-frequ
ency sensorineural hearing loss, weighted one or more of the high-freq
uency components in the complex the greatest. (C) 1996 Acoustical Soci
ety of America.