Hearing-impaired listeners show intact gap detection but prolonged forward masking that hides consonants

Evidence

Many listeners with hearing loss do not have large distortions to their ability to follow temporal changes in a sound, when measured using gap and modulation detection. However, deficits are profoundly evident with respect to forward masking and in temporal integration. The longer release of forward masking associated with SNHL has implications for the perception of both speech and music, in quiet and in noisy situations. Consider a highly fluctuating signal that contains information in the highand low-amplitude epochs. Within this fluctuating stimulus, the high-amplitude components may forward mask the low-amplitude ones. For a speech stimulus, then, we might observe high-energy vowels forward masking the low-energy consonants. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1699

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between transient measures (gap/modulation detection, largely intact) and sustained forward-masking/temporal-integration measures (profoundly impaired).