Abstract
This study considered consequences of sensorineural hearing loss in ten listeners. The characterization
of individual hearing loss was based on psychoacoustic data addressing audiometric pure-tone
sensitivity, cochlear compression, frequency selectivity, temporal resolution, and intensity discrimination.
In the experiments it was found that listeners with comparable audiograms can show very
different results in the supra-threshold measures. In an attempt to account for the observed individual
data, a model of auditory signal processing and perception [Jepsen et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
124, 422–438 (2008)] was used as a framework. The parameters of the cochlear processing stage of
the model were adjusted to account for behaviorally estimated individual basilar-membrane inputoutput
functions and the audiogram, from which the amounts of inner hair-cell and outer hair-cell
losses were estimated as a function of frequency. All other model parameters were left unchanged.
The predictions showed a reasonably good agreement with the measured individual data in the frequency
selectivity and forward masking conditions while the variation of intensity discrimination
thresholds across listeners was underestimated by the model. The model and the associated parameters
for individual hearing-impaired listeners might be useful for investigating effects of individual
hearing impairment in more complex conditions, such as speech intelligibility in noise.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Acoustical Society of America. Journal |
Volume | 129 |
Issue number | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 262-281 |
ISSN | 0001-4966 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Bibliographical note
Running title: Characterizing auditory processing in hearing impairmentKeywords
- Auditory processing
- Hair-cell loss
- Computational model
- Hearing impairment
- Cochlear nonlinearity