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British Medical Bulletin 43:909-925 (1987)
© 1987 The British Council

research-article

Speech perception in normal and impaired hearing

Quentin Summerfield

MRC institute of Hearing Research, University of Nottingham Nottinghasnshire

Abstract

A sensorineural hearing loss involves not only a reduction of sensitivity but also a set of suprathreshold impairments that distort the perception of sounds: listeners may suffer increased susceptibility to forward and backward masking, making it more likely that vowels will mask energy in weaker adjacent consonants; auditory filters are often broader than normal, leading to increased masking by background noises and by echoes in reverberant rooms; in extreme cases, even in quiet anechoic environments, difficulties may be experienced in detecting changes in the pitch of a talker's voice and in determining the spectral shape of speech sounds; the ability to analyse the temporal fine structure of the output of auditory filters may also be reduced, leading to difficulties in following rapid changes in amplitude, frequency, and pitch, and exacerbating the effects of noise. Hearing aids that are fitted to both ears and incorporate directional microphones can alleviate some of these problems. However, further benefits await advances in signal processing to enhance speech sounds corrupted by noise and reverberation.


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