Deficits at lower perceptual levels propagate upward through Erber’s hearing hierarchy

Evidence

Considering Erber’s (1982) hierarchy of perception, deficits at lower levels in the hierarchy (i.e., detection and discrimination) will be propagated to higher levels. Any listener with an elevated threshold or poor discrimination abilities, then, may be expected to experience difficulties in recognition and comprehension. Speech, however, is a rich and highly redundant signal, and a listener can often attend to multiple cues in speech to achieve understanding. Yet, deficits in the representation of any of these cues can lead to poorer performance and increased effort expended to understand speech. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1685

Categorization

• XREF: Hierarchy-of-processing logic parallels the reader’s interest in how deficits propagate from detection to comprehension across perceptual systems.