Vowel Perception in Normal and Hearing Impaired Listeners

This studied examined vowel perception in young adults of normal hearing and hearing impaired with a mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) listeners. Stimuli were presented at conversational level and were recorded, digitized, and edited syllables. The stimuli were broken down into varying transitions. Listeners discriminated the audio presented selected corresponding stimuli option based on his or her perception. Results showed that normal hearing listeners performed significantly better than the hearing impaired across three Transitions. Listeners with hearing loss were consistently worse, suggesting a poorer representation of the vowel transition (or the vowel) to begin with rather than poorer temporal processing. Regardless of representation, the findings supported that hearing impaired listeners have more difficulties with vowel perception than normal listeners.