Associations among frequency and temporal resolution and consonant recognition for hearing-impaired listeners

To examine the association between frequency and temporal resolution and speech recognition, auditory filter parameters, rates of masking decay, and stop-consonant recognition were determined for 9 normal-hearing and 24 hearing-impaired subjects. Speech-presentation levels were selected for each subject based on articulation index (AI) predictions. Results suggest that auditory filter widths and dynamic ranges were strongly correlated with pure-tone threshold, while time constants were not. Stop-consonant recognition scores for most hearing-impaired listeners were not significantly poorer than predicted by the AI model. Furthermore, differences between observed recognition scores and those predicted by the AI were poorly correlated with derived psychophysical parameter values, suggesting that measures of frequency and temporal resolution and speech recognition may appear to be associated primarily because of their dependence on auditory threshold.