Impaired word recognition in noise by patients with noise-induced cochlear hearing loss: contribution of temporal...

Fifteen patients with mild noise-induced cochlear hearing loss reported a selective difficulty in understanding speech in noisy settings. To examine the hypothesis that a temporal resolution defect was responsible for this difficulty, the patients were tested for their recognition of monosyllabic words presented against continuous and interrupted wide-band noise backgrounds, at each of seven signal-to-noise ratios. Their recognition performance was compared with that of normal listeners studied with the same paradigms. By comparison with the controls, the group with cochlear hearing loss showed a significant recognition impairment only for words presented against the interrupted masker. This finding was in keeping with the existence of a temporal resolution defect in cochlear disease, though it need not indicate a stimulus timing defect at the level of individual cochlear neurons.