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2012 Vol.31, Issue 5 Preview Page
A Relationship of Tone, Consonant, and Speech Perception in Audiological Diagnosis
Woojae Han1*
,
Jont B. Allen2
1Div. of Speech Pathology and Audiology, College of Natural Science, Hallym Univ., Chuncheon, Korea
2Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
*Corresponding Author
31 July 2012. pp. 298-308
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Abstract

This study was designed to examine the phoneme recognition errors of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners on a consonant-by-consonant basis, to show (1) how each HI ear perceives individual consonants differently and (2) how standard clinical measurements (i.e., using a tone and word) fail to predict these differences. Sixteen English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables of six signal-to-noise ratios in speech-weighted noise were presented at the most comfortable level for ears with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The findings were as follows: (1) individual HI listeners with a symmetrical pure-tone threshold showed different consonant-loss profiles (CLPs) (i.e., over a set of the 16 English consonants, the likelihood of misperceiving each consonant) in right and left ears. (2) A similar result was found across subjects. Paired ears of different HI individuals with identical pure-tone threshold presented different CLPs in one ear to the other. (3) Paired HI ears having the same averaged consonant score demonstrated completely different CLPs. We conclude that the standard clinical measurements are limited in their ability to predict the extent to which speech perception is degraded in HI ears, and thus they are a necessary, but not a sufficient measurement for HI speech perception. This suggests that the CV measurement would be a useful clinical tool.

Keywords
Tone perception
Consonant perception
Consonant loss profile
Speech perception
Hearing impairment
Audiologic diagnosis
Audiologic test battery
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Information
  • Publisher :The Acoustical Society of Korea
  • Publisher(Ko) :한국음향학회
  • Journal Title :The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
  • Journal Title(Ko) :한국음향학회지
  • Volume : 31
  • No :5
  • Pages :298-308
  • Received Date : 2012-04-04
  • Revised Date : 2012-05-14
  • Accepted Date : 2012-06-05
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