A Study on Psychoacoustical Proximity Between Japanese Monosyllables and its Application for Hearing Impairments

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A practical method for the qualitative analysis of impaired speech perception was developed based on graphical representations of psychoacoustical proximity among monosyllables. Qualitative analysis of speech perception confusion are needed for estimation of data from speech audiometry. A sample of this qualitative aspect can be exemplified by the contrast between /ro/and /pu/ responses to a /do/ primary stimulus. Both /ro/and/pu/ are incorrect, but the SDS (speech discrimination score) value assigned to either would be the same. Clearly, there are qualitative contrasts between these incorrect responses ; /do/to/ro/ has a far greater psychoacoustical proximity than /do/ to /pu/. The solution of this problem was the focus in this study. The psychoacoustical proximity was defined as the degree of ease of confusion among monosyllables for normal ears, and was measured as a confusion matrix among 67 Japanese monosyllables called " chokuon." This matrix was constructed from hearing tests on … More unclear perception induced by lowering stimulus levels for 26 listeners with normal hearing. Configuration graphs of the monosyllables where the proximity values were represented by the mutual distances were made from the confusion matrix using a non-metric multi-dimensional scaling method known as SMACOF. Using these graphs, the perceptual failures for the monosyllables on the part of a patient can be simply documented by connecting confused stumuli and corresponding wrong responses. This documentation indicates the abnormality of a patient's failures in terms of discrepancies from the ease of confusion for normal ears. For the application of this study, the qualitative characteristics of monosyllable confusion for 53 patients with hearing impairment were comparatively analyzed with and without hearing aids. Results show that this method is useful for describing the qualitative effects of hearing aids on speech perception, and that it thus provides importanat information for hearing aid selection. Less