Van Tasell D J, Fabry D A, Thibodeau L M
J Acoust Soc Am. 1987 May;81(5):1586-97. doi: 10.1121/1.394511.
Confusion matrices for seven synthetic steady-state vowels were obtained from ten normal and three hearing-impaired subjects. The vowels were identified at greater than 96% accuracy by the normals, and less accurately by the impaired subjects. Shortened versions of selected vowels then were used as maskers, and vowel masking patterns (VMPs) consisting of forward-masked threshold for sinusoidal probes at all vowel masker harmonics were obtained from the impaired subjects and from one normal subject. Vowel-masked probe thresholds were transformed using growth-of-masking functions obtained with flat-spectrum noise. VMPs of the impaired subjects, relative to those of the normal, were characterized by smaller dynamic range, poorer peak resolution, and poorer preservation of the vowel formant structure. These VMP characteristics, however, did not necessarily coincide with inaccurate vowel recognition. Vowel identification appeared to be related primarily to VMP peak frequencies rather than to the levels at the peaks or to between-peak characteristics of the patterns.
从10名正常受试者和3名听力受损受试者那里获得了7个合成稳态元音的混淆矩阵。正常受试者对这些元音的识别准确率高于96%，而听力受损受试者的识别准确率较低。然后将选定元音的缩短版本用作掩蔽音，并从听力受损受试者和一名正常受试者那里获得了元音掩蔽模式（VMP），该模式由所有元音掩蔽音谐波处正弦波探头的前掩蔽阈值组成。元音掩蔽探头阈值使用通过平坦频谱噪声获得的掩蔽增长函数进行变换。与正常受试者相比，听力受损受试者的VMP具有动态范围较小、峰值分辨率较差以及元音共振峰结构保存较差的特点。然而，这些VMP特征并不一定与不准确的元音识别相一致。元音识别似乎主要与VMP峰值频率有关，而不是与峰值处的电平或模式的峰间特征有关。
