SPECTRAL WEIGHTS FOR OVERALL LEVEL DISCRIMINATION IN LISTENERS WITH SENSORINEURAL HEARING-LOSS

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.