A comparison study of monosyllable recognition in listeners with sloping versus flathearing loss types

The present study examined the ability of monosyllable recognition in persons with high-frequency sloping hearing loss and flat hearing loss.A male and a female talker recorded 95 consonant-vowel (CV) and 35 vowel-consonant (VC) syllables (a total of 130 monosyllables) and all the syllables were presented at 65 dB SPL without background noise.As results, the monosyllable performance was compared between two listener groups or by target-talker gender, and we additionally investigated whether the recognition errors were influenced by error type, vowel context, and consonant features (articulation place or manner).Several findings were observed as follows.First, overall the gender of target talker did not influence listener's performance.Although the two groups did not differ in identifying CV syllables, the listeners with flat hearing loss had more errors for the VC syllables compared to the sloping group.Especially, individual differences of both CV and VC errors seemed to be relatively large for both groups, yet the differences were not correlated with listener's pure tone thresholds.This suggests a difficulty predicting the monosyllable errors by hearing loss configuration alone.Second, the most common error types were the substitution of the initial consonants in the CV syllables and the substitution of the final consonants in the VC syllables.Third, listeners recognized the final consonants more accurately within the /a/ vowel context compared to the other vowels whereas the performance with the /i/ and /e/ vowel contexts was relatively lower.Finally, both listener groups exhibited the lowest scores for stop consonants in the manner analysis, and the lowest scores for alveolar consonants in the place analysis.