Central Masking In Normal Listeners

Abstract

The central masking phenomenon (CM) was studied with a clinical audiometric paradigm in a group of 40 normal-hearing subjects. Contralateral maskers of wide-band noise and narrow-band noise were used each at 40 dB SL to evaluate thresholds for 500, 1 000, 2 000 and 4 000 Hz tones. CM was shown to increase in dB with increase in frequency of the test tone and with decrease in masker bandwidth. A corrective factor of 5 dB to 10 dB was suggested to account for the effect in clinical audio-metric evaluation.