David Marion, Tausend Alexis N, Strelcyk Olaf, Oxenham Andrew J
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, 55455, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, 55455, USA.
Hear Res. 2018 Jul;364:118-128. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2018.03.017. Epub 2018 Mar 21.
Segregating and understanding speech in complex environments is a major challenge for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. It remains unclear to what extent these difficulties are dominated by direct interference, such as simultaneous masking, or by a failure of the mechanisms of stream segregation. This study compared older HI listeners' performance with that of young and older normal-hearing (NH) listeners in stream segregation tasks involving speech sounds. Listeners were presented with sequences of speech tokens, each consisting of a fricative consonant and a voiced vowel (CV). The CV tokens were concatenated into interleaved sequences that alternated in fundamental frequency (F0) and/or simulated vocal tract length (VTL). Each pair of interleaved sequences was preceded by a "word" consisting of two random tokens. The listeners were asked to indicate whether the word was present in the following interleaved sequences. The word, if present, occurred within one of the interleaved sequences, so that performance improved if the listeners were able to perceptually segregate the two sequences. Although HI listeners' identification of the speech tokens in isolation was poorer than that of the NH listeners, HI listeners were generally able to use both F0 and VTL cues to segregate the interleaved sequences. The results suggest that the difficulties experienced by HI listeners in complex acoustic environments cannot be explained by a loss of basic stream segregation abilities.
在复杂环境中分离和理解语音对听力受损(HI)的听众来说是一项重大挑战。目前尚不清楚这些困难在多大程度上是由直接干扰(如同时掩蔽)主导,还是由流分离机制的失效主导。本研究比较了老年HI听众与年轻和老年正常听力(NH)听众在涉及语音的流分离任务中的表现。向听众呈现语音片段序列,每个片段由一个擦音辅音和一个浊音元音(CV)组成。CV片段被连接成在基频(F0)和/或模拟声道长度(VTL)上交替的交错序列。每对交错序列之前都有一个由两个随机片段组成的“单词”。要求听众指出该“单词”是否出现在随后的交错序列中。如果该“单词”存在,它会出现在其中一个交错序列中,因此如果听众能够在感知上分离这两个序列,表现就会提高。尽管HI听众单独识别语音片段的能力比NH听众差,但HI听众通常能够利用F0和VTL线索来分离交错序列。结果表明,HI听众在复杂声学环境中遇到的困难不能用基本流分离能力的丧失来解释。