Patterns of phoneme identification error in cochlear and eighth-nerve disorders

The purpose of this study was to determine whether patterns of phoneme identification error differ among listeners with cochlear and retrocochlear auditory disorder. Speech intelligibility performance was analyzed in 15 patients with confirmed eighth-nerve disorder and in 15 patients with cochlear disorders, matched to the retrocochlear group for age and audiometric configuration, using confusion matrices derived from responses to a monosyllabic word list. Results indicated that: (1) vowel errors were more prevalent in the retrocochlear group and varied directly with increasing stimulus presentation level; and (2) consonant errors did not differ in type or relative frequency between the two groups, nor was there a level-dependent effect for consonant errors. These results are supported by the results of closed-set vowel identification tests and thus do not appear to be an artifact of open-set testing. Vowel errors may account for a major part of the speech 'rollover' phenomenon typical of retrocochlear auditory dysfunction.