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Reduced spatial release from masking in hearing loss is not necessarily a spatial deficit.

Properties1
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, corroborated, xref, category/causal-relationships

3 min read

Reduced spatial release from masking in hearing loss is not necessarily a spatial deficit.

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Finally, it has been observed that SRM is often inversely related to the severity of hearing loss (e.g. Marrone et al. 2008 ). This raises the question of whether in some cases apparent spatial deficits might be related to reduced audibility in spatialized mixtures. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In many situations, listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) demonstrate reduced SRM compared to listeners with normal hearing (NH). This observation commonly leads to the conclusion that spatial processing is disrupted by hearing loss. However, convergent evidence from other kinds of spatial tasks is somewhat lacking. For example, studies that have measured fine discrimination of binaural cues have noted that individual variability is high, and some HI listeners perform as well as NH listeners (e.g. Colburn 1982 ; Spencer 2013 ). Free-field localization is not strongly affected by hearing loss unless it is highly asymmetric or very severe at low frequencies (e.g. Noble et al. 1994 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
  • XREF: connects to: Spatial release from masking deficits often reduce to an audibility problem — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722; Apparent spatial deficits in hearing loss may really be audibility deficits — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1722; Hearing-impaired listeners’ poor spatial hearing may not reflect actual spatial-processing deficits. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1721 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

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