Developmental Conductive Hearing Loss Reduces Modulation Masking Release.

摘要: Hearing-impaired individuals experience difficulties in detecting or understanding speech, especially background sounds within the same frequency range. However, normally hearing (NH) human listeners less difficulty a target tone noise when envelope of that is temporally gated (modulated) than flat across time (unmodulated). This perceptual benefit called modulation masking release (MMR). When flanking masker energy added well outside band target, and comodulated with original modulated masker, detection thresholds improve further (MMR+). In contrast, if antimodulated worsen (MMR-). These interactions disparate ranges are thought to require central nervous system (CNS) processing. Therefore, we explored effect developmental conductive loss (CHL) gerbils on MMR characteristics, as test for putative CNS mechanisms. The NH were lower noise, compared unmodulated noise. addition flanker improved performance, whereas an worsened performance. CHL-reared gerbils, all three forms reduced animals. results suggest CHL impairs both within- across-frequency processing provide behavioral evidence mechanisms affected by peripheral impairment.