Relationship between Psychophysical Abilities and Speech Perception for Subjects with Unilateral and Bilateral Cochlear Hearing Impairments

Over the past few years several groups have reported studies of the relationship between psychophysical abilities and speech perception in the hearing impaired (e.g., Dreschler and Plomp, 1980, 1985; Festen and Plomp, 1983; Patterson et al., 1982; Tyler et al., 1982). Such studies can have a number of different (non-exclusive) purposes, including: 1) To gain more insight into the difficulties of speech perception experienced by the hearing impaired, especially in noisy situations; 2) To make inferences about the relative importance of different types of information in speech (e.g., spectral versus temporal); 3) to provide guidelines for the design of “signal-processing” hearing aids which are intended to (partially) compensate for one or more of the deficits found in the hearing impaired. Our own work in this area has all three of these purposes, but in this paper we will concentrate on the first two.