The effects of temporal envelope confusion on release of masking

Widened auditory filters in hearing impaired (HI) listeners may force them to rely more on temporal envelope (TE) cues when listening to speech. We propose that reduced masking release in HI listeners may be partially due to the confusion of the TE's of the masker and target. The current study investigates HI listener's comprehension of low- or high-pass vocoded spondees in the presence of fluctuating and stationary background noise. The spectral relationship of the target and masker was systematically varied from greater to no spectral overlap; the TE's of the masker and target were varied in similarity along two aspects — amplitude-modulation rate and shape. Preliminary data have shown the TE confusion in some HI impaired listeners results in speech understanding scores that are poorer in the presence of fluctuating noise (at a rate of 4Hz) than when the stationary noise is present. On the other hand, another group of HI listeners has demonstrated masking release. The effect of TE confusion of speech-en...