Masking of noise bursts by an adjacent vowel for hearing-impaired listeners.

Some masking effects of synthetic vowels on adjacent noise bursts are reported for hearing-impaired listeners. The 200-ms vowels were similar to [a] and [i]; the 50-ms noise bursts were in one of three frequency bands: .5 to 1.5, 1.5 to 4, or 4 to 6 kHz. With voiceless-stop-like temporal intervals between the stimuli, there was little backward or forward masking of the noise bursts by either vowel. Some forward masking occurred under proximate conditions of vowel and burst in time and frequency.