Informational Masking in Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Listeners Measured in a Nonspeech Pattern Identification Task

Individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) often experience more difficulty with listening in multisource environments than do normal-hearing (NH) listeners. While the peripheral effects of sensorineural hearing loss certainly contribute to this difficulty, differences in central processing of auditory information may also contribute. To explore this issue, it is important to account for peripheral differences between NH and these hearing-impaired (HI) listeners so that central effects in multisource listening can be examined. In the present study, NH and HI listeners performed a tonal pattern identification task at two distant center frequencies (CFs), 850 and 3500 Hz. In an attempt to control for differences in the peripheral representations of the stimuli, the patterns were presented at the same sensation level (15 dB SL), and the frequency deviation of the tones comprising the patterns was adjusted to obtain equal quiet pattern identification performance across all listeners at both CFs. Tonal sequences were then presented at both CFs simultaneously (informational masking conditions), and listeners were asked either to selectively attend to a source (CF) or to divide attention between CFs and identify the pattern at a CF designated after each trial. There were large differences between groups in the frequency deviations necessary to perform the pattern identification task. After compensating for these differences, there were small differences between NH and HI listeners in the informational masking conditions. HI listeners showed slightly greater performance asymmetry between the low and high CFs than did NH listeners, possibly due to central differences in frequency weighting between groups.