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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

An Automated System for Sound Localization Testing in Hearing-Impaired Listeners
Published on: March 13, 2026
The effect of hearing impairment on the identification of speech that is modulated synchronously or asynchronously
Joseph W Hall1, Emily Buss, John H Grose
1Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA. jwh@med.unc.edu
Abstract:
This study investigated the effect of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss on the ability to identify speech in noise for vowel-consonant-vowel tokens that were either unprocessed, amplitude modulated synchronously across frequency, or amplitude modulated asynchronously across frequency. One goal of the study was to determine whether hearing-impaired listeners have a particular deficit in the ability to integrate asynchronous spectral information in the perception of speech. Speech tokens were presented at a high, fixed sound level and the level of a speech-shaped noise was changed adaptively to estimate the masked speech identification threshold. The performance of the hearing-impaired listeners was generally worse than that of the normal-hearing listeners, but the impaired listeners showed particularly poor performance in the synchronous modulation condition. This finding suggests that integration of asynchronous spectral information does not pose a particular difficulty for hearing-impaired listeners with mild/moderate hearing losses. Results are discussed in terms of common mechanisms that might account for poor speech identification performance of hearing-impaired listeners when either the masking noise or the speech is synchronously modulated.
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