Recognition performance on words interrupted (10 ips, 50% duty cycle) with two interruption patterns referenced to word onset: Young listeners with normal hearing for pure tones and older listeners with sensorineural hearing loss

Abstract

Objective: To determine in an interrupted word paradigm (Maryland CNCs; 10 ips, 50% duty cycle) if different locations of the interruption pattern produce different recognition performances. Design: Repeated measures using two interruption patterns that were complementary halves referenced to word onset; one started with word onset (0-ms), the other started 50 ms later. The hypothesis was that recognition performance would be better on the 0-ms condition than on the 50-ms condition, but there would be some words with the reverse relation. Study sample: Twenty-four young adults with normal hearing for pure tones and 32 older adults (mean = 67 years) with sensorineural hearing loss participated. Results: With the young listeners mean recognition performance on the 0-ms condition (63.1%) was significantly better than the mean performance on the 50-ms condition (47.8%). About twice as many words had better performance on the 0-ms condition. With the older listeners, who were given only stimuli on which performances were > 58% by the young normals, performances on the two conditions were the same. Conclusions: The hypothesis was supported with the young listeners. The equal performance by the older listeners on the two conditions was attributed to the manner in which the words were selected.

Key Words::

• Auditory perception
• hearing loss
• interrupted speech
• speech perception

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, Department of Veterans Affairs through the Auditory and Vestibular Dysfunction Research Enhancement Award Program (REAP) at Mountain Home, and a Senior Research Career Scientist award to the first author. Appreciation is expressed to J. Hunter Mansfield who assisted with data collection. Portions of this work were presented at the Aging and Speech Communication 5th International and Interdisciplinary Research Conference in Bloomington, USA (October, 2013). The first author is now affiliated with Arizona State University.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Supplementary material available online

Supplementary Figure 1, Tables 1 and 2 available online at http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/14992027.2015.1055839.