Measuring Binaural Temporal-Fine-Structure Sensitivity in Hearing-Impaired Listeners, Using the TFS-AF Test

Various methods have been used to measure temporal-fine-structure (TFS) sensitivity in hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. A new method called TFS-adaptive frequency (TFS-AF) test, tracks the highest frequency up to which a person can detect a given interaural phase difference (IPD) in bursts of pure tones. So far, the test was only administered to listeners with normal hearing (NH) or impaired low-frequency hearing. It is currently not known if this test can also be used for listeners with different configurations of hearing losses.

To investigate whether the TFS-AF test can also be used on listeners with a larger diversity of hearing losses and what would be the best fixed IPD value to conduct the test.

Using a cross-sectional study design, we compared the thresholds of TFS-AF test between the NH and HI listeners at three different IPDs (90°, 60°, and 30°).

Thirty NH (mean age = 37.9; range 19-53 years) and thirty HI (mean age = 38.6; range 19-53 years) with different configurations of hearing losses were tested.

The listeners were able to complete the TFS-AF test at larger values of IPD. Average thresholds were lower (i.e., worse) in the HI listeners than in the NH listeners. Threshold did not correlate with the listeners' age in each group.

This test can be used clinically as it provides a graded measure of TFS ability for young to young-old adult listeners with a variety of hearing losses.