Hearing loss reduces audibility and restricts usable bandwidth for temporal processing

Evidence

Both findings have implications for listeners with hearing loss who experience reduced audibility, and therefore an impoverished representation of sound level, and often a restricted audible bandwidth, particularly if they have a sloping or rising hearing loss. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1048

The hallmark of hearing loss is elevated thresholds, which lead to a reduction in stimulus audibility in a frequency-dependent way. Hearing loss decreases the representation of sound level in the auditory system and in many cases alters the internal representation of stimulus bandwidth, particularly for sloping or rising losses. Thus, care must be taken when interpreting the results of temporal processing experiments, as experiments on temporal resolution (gap detection, TMTF, and forward masking) all, to some degree, illustrate level and bandwidth effects. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1082

Florentine, Fastl, and Buus (1998) measured thresholds for pure tones at a variety of stimulus durations and attempted to control for audibility and bandwidth using a noise masker to simulate hearing loss. … All of the listeners with sensorineural loss demonstrated thresholds that change less with increasing duration (shallower slopes), indicative of a temporal integration deficit in listeners with hearing loss. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1113

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in impaired-hearing perception differences — the mechanism by which sloping/rising hearing loss degrades temporal cues.
• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism by which hearing loss confounds temporal processing measurement.
• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on gap detection and forward masking findings (Plomp, Viemeister, etc.) referenced as background. — connects to: Hearing damage widens acoustic filter bandwidth, impairing speech separation and sensitivity — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 674
• QUESTION: Did the noise-masker simulated-loss listeners show the same shallower slopes, or only the real-hearing-loss group? The passage implies but does not state the simulated result.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1048; Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1082; Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1113