Hearing-impaired listeners gain far less from noise gaps than normal listeners

Evidence

Obviously, the subjects with hearing loss have more difficulty to understand monosyllables presented in “valleys” of the fluctuating noise (cf. Fig. 16.38d). The “benefit” for the fluctuating noise of 7 dB for normal hearing subjects shrinks to 3 dB for the subjects with 40 dB hearing loss at 4 kHz. Since the reduction in performance of subjects with hearing loss versus subjects with normal hearing is larger for the time-varying background noise, it is recommended to use a fluctuating background when testing speech in noise for subjects with hearing loss. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1999

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in hearing loss mechanisms and why impaired listeners fail to benefit from temporal dips — a known hallmark of cochlear hearing loss.