Identification of synthetic /bdg/ by hearing-impaired listeners under monotic and dichotic formant presentation.

Individuals with sensorineural hearing losses of both flat and sloping configuration evidence difficulty in identifying stop consonant place of articulation. To assess whether upward spread of masking is responsible for this difficulty, we presented hearing-impaired listeners with stimuli from a /ba da ga/ continuum in both monotic and dichotic (F1 to one ear; F2/F3 to the other ear) listening conditions. In the monotic conditions, listeners with similar audiograms evidence great variability in identification performance. In the dichotic conditions performance did not generally improve. For a few listeners, however, the improvement was striking. At moderate levels of signal presentation, upward spread of masking does not appear to be responsible for the poor identification of place by the majority of listeners with moderate hearing losses.