Pitch perception deficits from hearing loss impair speech segregation from noise.

Evidence

Because pitch also provides an important cue for the understanding of speech in complex environments, deficits in pitch perception can degrade this ability. Listeners with hearing loss demonstrate difficulty using pitch cues to segregate sounds from a background (Oxenham, 2008). For example, Arehart, King, and McLean-Mudgett (1997) showed that the ability to identify two synthetic vowels with different fundamental frequencies was negatively impacted by hearing loss. The differences were fairly small under quiet conditions but became much larger when the synthetic vowels were presented in a background noise. Summers and Leek (1998) measured direct deficits in f0 discrimination abilities in listeners with hearing loss and linked these deficits to difficulty discriminating between speech samples presented at different f0s. Lorenzi, Gilbert, Carn, Garnier, and Moore (2006) and Strelcyk and Dau (2009) noted that deficits in the perception of temporal fine structure were also connected to poor speech perception. On the whole, poor pitch perception has a strong and detrimental effect on the ability to communicate in complex environments. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1702