Loss of cochlear compression alone impairs hearing soft syllables amid louder ones

Evidence

Specifically, we describe an experiment designed to examine how the loss of cochlear compression affects the recognition of relatively soft syllables occurring in the presence of louder, flanking syllables of varying levels. The aim is to reveal the role of cochlear compression in multi-speaker environments or those with disruptive background noise. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4046

The results indicate that, when the compression of normal hearing has been cancelled, it is difficult to hear syllables at low sound levels when they are sandwiched between syllables with higher levels. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4045

The results indicate that, when the compression of normal hearing has been cancelled, it is difficult to hear syllables at low sound levels when they are sandwiched between syllables with higher levels. The hearing losses observed in patients will commonly involve multiple auditory problems and they will interact in complicated ways that make it difficult to distinguished the effects of any one component of auditory processing. The HI simulator shows how a single factor can be isolated using an auditory model, provided the model is sufficiently detailed. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4045

Categorization

• corroborated: 8 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4046; Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4045
• XREF: connects to: Outer-hair-cell damage destroys the cochlea’s compressive nonlinearity, which hearing aids try to rebuild.; Cochlear suppression is essential for coding complex sounds but poorly characterized in hearing loss; Lost cochlear compression degrades speech formant coding in hearing-impaired listeners (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Loss of peripheral compression alone impairs recognition of low-level syllables between louder ones #corroborates (0.95)
• Volume compression worsens speech intelligibility by flattening syllabic amplitude cues #corroborates (0.75) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2492
• Wide dynamic range compression degrades perception of speech temporal cues like stop consonants #corroborates (0.72)