PERCEPTION OF COMPLEX AUDITORY STIMULI BY THE DEAF

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The long term goal of the research is to discover basic psychoacoustic characterizations of impaired hearing that will determine acoustic enhancements to facilitate speech perception. Moderate-to-profoundly hearing-impaired young adults will be studied for their use of spectral cues to consonant recognition. Consonants with spectral cues in different frequency regions and in static versus dynamic acoustic segments will be tested. The consonants will reside in VCV tokens extracted from fluent speech. The listeners will be preselected to differ in ability to use spectral cues. Auditory factors will be examined to differentiate listeners with good versus poor cue-use. Consonant audibility estimates, and some measures of frequency and temporal resolution will be analyzed in relation to spectral cue-use. Consonants with different degrees of acoustic degradation will be tested for listeners with good spectral cue-use. The degradations will be frequency and temporal alterations that are imposed on consonant segments containing the spectral cues. The alterations that reduce consonant perception will reveal the minimal acoustic properties that enabled the listeners' spectral cue-use. These acoustic properties will be exaggerated in consonants tested for hearing-impaired listeners with poor spectral cue-use. The exaggerations may facilitate such listeners' use of spectral cues and, thus, improve their consonant recognition.