The temporal effect in listeners with mild to moderate cochlear hearing impairment (original) (raw)
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Temporal masking functions for listeners with real and simulated hearing loss
Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2011
A functional simulation of hearing loss was evaluated in its ability to reproduce the temporal masking functions for eight listeners with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss. Each audiometric loss was simulated in a group of age-matched normal-hearing listeners through a combination of spectrally-shaped masking noise and multi-band expansion. Temporal-masking functions were obtained in both groups of listeners using a forward-masking paradigm in which the level of a 110ms masker required to just mask a 10-ms fixed-level probe (5-10 dB SL) was measured as a function of the time delay between the masker offset and probe onset. At each of four probe frequencies (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz), temporal-masking functions were obtained using maskers that were 0.55, 1.0, and 1.15 times the probe frequency. The slopes and y-intercepts of the masking functions were not significantly different for listeners with real and simulated hearing loss. The y-intercepts were positively correlated with level of hearing loss while the slopes were negatively correlated. The ratio of the slopes obtained with the low-frequency maskers relative to the on-frequency maskers was similar for both groups of listeners and indicated a smaller compressive effect than that observed in normal-hearing listeners.
Temporal masking functions for listeners with real and
2011
A functional simulation of hearing loss was evaluated in its ability to reproduce the temporal masking functions for eight listeners with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss. Each audiometric loss was simulated in a group of age-matched normal-hearing listeners through a combination of spectrally-shaped masking noise and multi-band expansion. Temporal-masking functions were obtained in both groups of listeners using a forward-masking paradigm in which the level of a 110ms masker required to just mask a 10-ms fixed-level probe (5-10 dB SL) was measured as a function of the time delay between the masker offset and probe onset. At each of four probe frequencies (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz), temporal-masking functions were obtained using maskers that were 0.55, 1.0, and 1.15 times the probe frequency. The slopes and y-intercepts of the masking functions were not significantly different for listeners with real and simulated hearing loss. The y-intercepts were positively correlated with level of hearing loss while the slopes were negatively correlated. The ratio of the slopes obtained with the low-frequency maskers relative to the on-frequency maskers was similar for both groups of listeners and indicated a smaller compressive effect than that observed in normal-hearing listeners. V
Auditory temporal and spectral resolution in normal and impaired hearing
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 1999
Temporal, spectral, and combined temporal-spectral resolution of hearing was assessed by recording masked hearing thresholds . The masker was an octave band noise. Spectral resolution was assessed by introducing a spectral gap of half an octave bandwidth in the masker. A 50-msec gap assessed temporal resolution . The spectral and temporal gaps were used separately or simultaneously . Normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects participated . For each masking condition, the subjects were tested at masker levels 50, 60, 70, and 80 dB SPL and at test-tone frequencies 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz. Normal-hearing subjects showed reduced masking with spectral and temporal gaps . The combination of spectral and temporal gap reduced masking further. The release of masking was dependent upon the masker level. Hearing-impaired subjects showed less release of masking than normal-hearing subjects. The degree of hearing impairment was inversely related to release of masking. Reliability of the test procedure was assessed .
Informational masking in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss
Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO, 2002
Measures of energetic and informational masking were obtained from 46 listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. The task was to detect the presence of a sequence of eight contiguous 60-ms bursts of a pure tone embedded in masker bursts that were played synchronously with the signal. The masker was either a sequence of Gaussian noise bursts (energetic masker) or a sequence of random-frequency 2-tone bursts (informational masker). The 2-tone maskers were of two types: one type that normally tends to produce large amounts of informational masking and a second type that normally tends to produce very little informational masking. The two informational maskers are called "multiple-bursts same" (MBS), because the same frequency components are present in each burst of a sequence, and "multiple-bursts different" (MBD), because different frequency components are presented in each burst of a sequence. The difference in masking observed for these two maskers is thought to ...
Susceptibility to intraspeech spread of masking in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1983
Previous research with speechlike signals has suggested that upward spread of masking from the first formant (F 1) may interfere with the identification of place of articulation information signaled by changes in the upper formants. This suggestion was tested by presenting two-formant stop consonant-vowel syllables varying along a/ba/-/da/-/ga/continuum to hearing-impaired listeners ...... • •_a-.... : _, _ _ ,_ , g, uupcu accra umg to cumogzcm basis of the disorder. The syllables were presented monaurally at 80 dB and 100 dB SPL when formant amplitudes were equal and when F 1 amplitude was reduced by 6, 12, and 18 dB. Noise-on-tone masking patterns were also generated using narrow bands of noise at 80 and 100 dB $PL to assess the extent of upward spread of masking. Upward spread of masking could be demonstrated in both speech and nonspeech tasks, irrespective of the subject's age, audiometric configuration, or etiology of hearing impairment. Attenuation of F 1 had different effects on phonetic identification in different subject groups: While listeners with noise-induced hearing loss showed substantial improvement in identifying place of articulation, upward spread of masking did not consistently account for poor place identification in other types of sensorineural hearing impairment.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017
The masking release (i.e., better speech recognition in fluctuating compared to continuous noise backgrounds) observed for normal-hearing (NH) listeners is generally reduced or absent in hearingimpaired (HI) listeners. One explanation for this lies in the effects of reduced audibility: elevated thresholds may prevent HI listeners from taking advantage of signals available to NH listeners during the dips of temporally fluctuating noise where the interference is relatively weak. This hypothesis was addressed through the development of a signal-processing technique designed to increase the audibility of speech during dips in interrupted noise. This technique acts to (i) compare shortterm and long-term estimates of energy, (ii) increase the level of short-term segments whose energy is below the average energy, and (iii) normalize the overall energy of the processed signal to be equivalent to that of the original long-term estimate. Evaluations of this energy-equalizing (EEQ) technique included consonant identification and sentence reception in backgrounds of continuous and regularly interrupted noise. For HI listeners, performance was generally similar for processed and unprocessed signals in continuous noise; however, superior performance for EEQ processing was observed in certain regularly interrupted noise backgrounds.
Temporal masking in psychoacoustics can happen when the masker is presented before, simultaneously with, or even shortly after the probe. The last case, termed backward masking or pre-masking, has not been studied as extensively as forward masking and simultaneous masking. Some even suggested that pre-masking is but a matter of confusion between the masker and the probe, and a well-trained subject would not report it. Other studies showed that pre-masking can be reliably measured within a time course of 1 to 5 ms [1]. In this work, we present the possibility that the masker, although delivered to the ear canal later than the probe, has a chance to catch up with the probe once it launches a traveling wave into the cochlea. This speculation is based on the known fact that the traveling wave velocity increases against the stimulus level in the cochlea [2]. In this work, simulation using a nonlinear model of cochlear mechanics [3] shows that the group delay from the stapes to the 4-kHz ...
Suppression and comodulation masking release in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2010
The detectability of a sinusoidal signal embedded in a masker at the signal frequency can be improved by simultaneously presenting additional maskers in off-frequency regions if the additional maskers and the on-frequency masker component have the same temporal envelope. This effect is commonly referred to as comodulation masking release ͑CMR͒. Recently, it was hypothesized that peripheral nonlinear processes such as suppression may play a role in CMR over several octaves when the level of the off-frequency masker component is higher than the level of the on-frequency masker component. The aim of the present study was to test this hypothesis by measuring suppression and CMR within the same subjects for various frequency-level combinations of the off-frequency masker component. Experimental data for normal-hearing listeners show a large overlap between the existence regions for suppression and CMR. Hearing-impaired subjects with a sensorineural hearing loss show, on average, negligible suppression and CMR. The data support the hypothesis that part of the CMR in experiments with large spectral distances and large level differences between the masker components is due to the nonlinear processing at the level of the cochlea.
Physiological prediction of masking release for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013
Léger et al. (2012c) measured the intelligibility of speech in steady and spectrally or temporally modulated maskers for stimuli filtered into low-(< 1.5 kHz) and mid-frequency (1−3 kHz) regions. Listeners with high-frequency hearing loss but near to clinically normal audiograms in the low-and mid-frequency regions showed poorer performance than a control group with normal hearing, but showed preserved spectral and temporal masking release. Here, we investigated whether a physiologically accurate model of the auditory periphery (Zilany et al., 2009) can explain these masking release data. Intelligibility was predicted using the Neurogram SIMilarity (NSIM) metric of Hines and Harte (2010 and 2012). This metric can make use of either an "all-information" neurogram with small time bins or a "mean-rate" neurogram with large time bins. The average audiograms of the different groups of listeners from the study of Léger et al. were simulated in the model by applying different mixes of outer and/or inner hair cell impairment. Very accurate predictions of the human data for both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired groups were obtained from the all-information NSIM metric (i.e., taking into account phase-locking information) with threshold shifts produced predominantly by OHC impairment (and minimal IHC impairment).
Auditory Time-Frequency Masking for Spectrally and Temporally Maximally-Compact Stimuli
PLOS ONE, 2016
Many audio applications perform perception-based time-frequency (TF) analysis by decomposing sounds into a set of functions with good TF localization (i.e. with a small essential support in the TF domain) using TF transforms and applying psychoacoustic models of auditory masking to the transform coefficients. To accurately predict masking interactions between coefficients, the TF properties of the model should match those of the transform. This involves having masking data for stimuli with good TF localization. However, little is known about TF masking for mathematically well-localized signals. Most existing masking studies used stimuli that are broad in time and/or frequency and few studies involved TF conditions. Consequently, the present study had two goals. The first was to collect TF masking data for well-localized stimuli in humans. Masker and target were 10-ms Gaussianshaped sinusoids with a bandwidth of approximately one critical band. The overall pattern of results is qualitatively similar to existing data for long maskers. To facilitate implementation in audio processing algorithms, a dataset provides the measured TF masking function. The second goal was to assess the potential effect of auditory efferents on TF masking using a modeling approach. The temporal window model of masking was used to predict present and existing data in two configurations: (1) with standard model parameters (i.e. without efferents), (2) with cochlear gain reduction to simulate the activation of efferents. The ability of the model to predict the present data was quite good with the standard configuration but highly degraded with gain reduction. Conversely, the ability of the model to predict existing data for long maskers was better with than without gain reduction. Overall, the model predictions suggest that TF masking can be affected by efferent (or other) effects that reduce cochlear gain. Such effects were avoided in the experiment of this study by using maximally-compact stimuli.