Susceptibility to intraspeech spread of masking in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss

In the present investigation, one question of interest was the relationship between upward spread of masking and phonetic identification among listeners with sensorineural hearing impairment. Two experiments, one a detection masking task and another a recognition masking task, were designed to measure susceptibility to upward spread of masking. It was found that while listeners with noise-induced hearing loss showed substantial improvement in identifying place of articulation, upward spread of masking did not consistently account for poor place identification in other types of sensorineural hearing impairment.