Formant transition duration and speech recognition in normal and hearing-impaired listeners

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
C W TurnerS L Stewart

Abstract

Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss often have difficulty discriminating stop consonants even when the speech signals are presented at high levels. One possible explanation for this deficit is that hearing-impaired listeners cannot use the information contained in the rapid formant transitions as well as normal-hearing listeners. If this is the case, then perhaps slowing the rate of frequency change in formant transitions might assist their ability to perceive these speech sounds. In the present study, sets of consonant plus vowel (CV) syllables were synthesized corresponding to /ba, da, ga/ with formant transitions for each set ranging from 5 to 160 ms in duration. The listener's task was to identify the consonant in a three-alternative, closed-set response task. The results for normal-hearing listeners showed nearly perfect performance for transitions of 20 ms and longer, whereas the shortest transitions yielded poorer performance. A group of eight hearing-impaired listeners pure-tone averages (PTAs) ranging from 30 to 62 dB HL) was also tested. The hearing-impaired listeners tended to show poorer performance than the normals for transitions of all durations; however, the performance of a few hearing-impaired subjects w...Continue Reading

References

Aug 1, 1992·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·C W TurnerA R Horwitz
Sep 1, 1990·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·F G Zeng, C W Turner
May 1, 1987·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·C W Turner, M P Robb
Feb 1, 1985·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·M F DormanJ M Lindholm
Jun 1, 1972·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·E OwensE D Schubert
Jun 1, 1995·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·V Summers, M R Leek

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Citations

Jan 8, 2008·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Sheetal DesaiFan-Gang Zeng
Apr 10, 2009·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Esther Janse
Aug 4, 2018·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·Pamela SouzaPaul Reinhart
Jan 30, 2015·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·Pamela E SouzaFrederick J Gallun
Sep 28, 1999·American Journal of Audiology·C W Turner, K J Cummings
Oct 2, 2007·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·Sandra Gordon-SalantSarah A Friedman
Apr 10, 2004·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·John H GroseEmily Buss
Aug 28, 2001·Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR·S Gordon-Salant, P J Fitzgibbons
Feb 5, 2004·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Jean C Krause, Louis D Braida

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Related Concepts

Related Feeds

Auditory Perception

Auditory perception is the ability to receive and interpret information attained by the ears. Here is the latest research on factors and underlying mechanisms that influence auditory perception.