Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 11, 2026

Neuro-rehabilitation Approach for Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss
Published on: January 25, 2016
Spectral weights for overall level discrimination in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss
1Communication Sciences and Disorders, Syracuse University, New York 13244, USA.
Abstract:
A conditional-on-a-single-stimulus (COSS) analysis procedure [B. G. Berg, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 1743-1746 (1989)] was used to measure the weight or relative reliance that normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners give to different frequencies in the discrimination of the overall level of a multitone complex. On each trial, two multitone-tone complexes comprised of six octave frequencies from 250 to 8000 Hz were presented to subjects. The levels of the frequencies for each complex were randomly varied. The listeners task was to identify the complex with the higher overall intensity level. Normal-hearing listeners used a variety of listening strategies to perform the task, showing no general preference to weight one component over another. Hearing-impaired listeners, however, showed a general tendency to give greatest weight to the spectral information in the region of their hearing loss. Thirteen of the 14 hearing-impaired listeners, all of whom had a high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, weighted one or more of the high-frequence components in the complex the greatest.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
The Cochlea
Sound Intensity Level
The human ear can perceive an extensive range of sound intensity, necessitating the use of the logarithmic scale to define a physical quantity—the intensity level. It is a ratio of two intensities and hence a...
Expected Frequencies in Goodness-of-Fit Tests
Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location
Place theory, or place coding, suggests that different pitches are heard because various sound waves activate specific locations along the cochlea's basilar membrane. The brain determines the pitch of a sound by identifying...

