Duration discrimination in listeners with cochlear hearing loss: effects of stimulus type and frequency. |
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Authors: | John H Grose Joseph W Hall Emily Buss |
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Affiliation: | Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7070, USA. jhg@med.unc.edu |
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Abstract: | This study examined the effects of cochlear hearing loss on the ability to discriminate increments in the duration of a stimulus under conditions where the frequency and/or amplitude of the stimulus change dynamically. Three stimulus types were used: pure tones, frequency-modulated tones, and narrow bands of noise. The carrier/center frequency of each 250-ms stimulus either remained constant at 1035 Hz or varied randomly from presentation to presentation across the frequency range 432-2804 Hz. Two groups of listeners participated: 9 with bilateral cochlear hearing loss and 7 with normal hearing sensitivity. The results showed no differences in performance between the 2 groups. However, both groups showed poorer duration discrimination for the conditions where the carrier/center frequency changed randomly than for the conditions where the carrier/center frequency remained constant. In addition, performance was poorer for the narrowband noise stimuli than for the tonal stimuli. This pattern of results suggests that across-frequency temporal judgments are more difficult than isofrequency temporal judgments, but that cochlear hearing loss does not exacerbate this difficulty per se. |
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