Low-level auditory deficits cascade upward to impair speech comprehension

Evidence

As we have observed throughout the chapters in this textbook, listeners with hearing loss experience a number of deficits in their auditory perception. Each of these deficits can have a real impact on the ability to communicate in the natural environments. 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

• DEFINE: Introduces Erber’s hierarchy of perception: detection, discrimination, recognition, comprehension.
• XREF: Relates to trade-regime cascade arguments about how failures at one level propagate; also to hierarchical models of signal processing generally.