PERIPHERAL AND CENTRAL PROCESSES IN AUDITORY MASKING

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The goal of this work is to gain better understanding of the role of central factors in auditory masking in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. During the past two decades, the appreciation of the process of masking as consisting of both peripheral and central components has greatly increased due in large part to studies of "informational masking". Informational masking arises from stimulus uncertainty and involves cognitive factors such as focused attention and memory. Informational masking taps processes that may be important in everyday listening environments containing multiple sound sources and varying degrees of complexity. The purpose of this study is to extend the work on informational masking to listeners with hearing loss. This knowledge is critical because of the prevalence of auditory pathologies affecting the sensory mechanism and the extreme difficulty in communication such pathologies often cause, particularly in noisy listening conditions. Although it is clear that sensory pathology affects the spectral and temporal analysis performed at the periphery, there appears to be a significant component to masking that cannot be attributed purely to peripheral deficits. The plan is to test the hypothesis that some listeners with sensorineural hearing loss- especially those reporting extreme difficulty communicating in noise- experience large amounts of informational masking in certain conditions and make poor use of the cues that normally reduce informational masking. This hypothesis will be examined through a series of psychoacoustical experiments employing listeners with cochlear hearing loss. The goal is to correlate the amount of informational masking and ability to use cues to overcome informational masking with factors such as etiology and configuration of loss, age and speech recognition. A related goal is to better understand the conditions that normally cause informational masking and the cues or detection strategies that can reduce informational masking.