The optimal threshold for removing noise from speech is similar across normal and impaired hearing—a time-frequency masking study

Hearing-impaired listeners' intolerance to background noise during speech perception is well known. The current study employed speech materials free of ceiling effects to reveal the optimal trade-off between rejecting noise and retaining speech during time-frequency masking. This relative criterion value (-7 dB) was found to hold across noise types that differ in acoustic spectro-temporal complexity. It was also found that listeners with hearing impairment and those with normal hearing performed optimally at this same value, suggesting no true noise intolerance once time-frequency units containing speech are extracted.