Reduced audibility, not spatial processing loss, may explain apparent spatial deficits in HI listeners

Evidence

This raises the question of whether in some cases apparent spatial deficits might be related to reduced audibility in spatialized mixtures. A popular stimulus paradigm that has been used in recent years consists of a frontally located speech target, and competing speech maskers presented symmetrically from the sides. This configuration was originally implemented to minimize the contribution of long-term head-shadow benefits to SRM (Noble et al. 1997 ; Marrone et al. 2008 ) but has since been adopted as a striking case in which the difference between NH and HI listeners is large. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722

Categorization

• QUESTION: The chapter’s hypothesis: symmetric-masker SRM deficits may trace to audibility rather than binaural/spatial coding loss.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722