The ability to identify where sound is coming from is required for everyday listening tasks such as identifying in which direction the phone is ringing and to help locate who is calling your name in a social situation. While this localization ability has been found to be reduced in listeners with a hearing loss in the typically measured frequency range of 250 to 8000 kHz, less is known about listeners who have a hearing loss that is mainly limited to the extended high frequencies of 8 to 14 kHz, particularly when abilities are tested with speech stimuli. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether listeners with a hearing impairment at these higher frequencies performed less accurately in a number of localization tasks. Twenty-three participants with normal hearing (thresholds not exceeding 20 dB HL from 250 to 14 kHz) and 23 participants with normal hearing up to and including 3 kHz and with at least a moderate hearing loss in the extended high frequencies (thresholds reaching at least 55 dB HL in any of the frequencies from 8 kHz to 14 kHz), localized noise and speech stimuli at a level of 75 dBA in a free field situation. Thirteen speakers were used in four different speaker arrangements; the frontal horizontal plane, lateral horizontal plane, frontal vertical plane and lateral vertical plane. The noise stimuli included noise band-passed filtered between 300 Hz and 16 kHz, and 300 Hz and 8 kHz. Speech stimuli were individual words with strong amounts of high frequency content above 8 kHz and weak amounts of high frequency content above 8 kHz. The two types of speech stimuli were also band-passed filtered using the same filter cut-off frequencies as the noise stimuli. No significant main effect differences were found between the localization ability of the two hearing groups for any of the four experiments. However, within experiment analysis revealed in the lateral vertical plane the normal hearing group localized significantly better than the hearing loss group for both the strong and weak stimuli. Significant differences were also found across experiments with both groups of participants localizing more accurately in the frontal horizontal plane and worst in the frontal vertical plane. All participants were found to localize significantly better with the greater bandwidth of 300 Hz to 16 kHz, and also for both types of speech stimuli when compared to the noise stimuli, although post hoc analysis found that these differences were not consistent between all speaker locations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/9641 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Gray, Sarah Elizabeth |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Department of Communication Disorders |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Sarah Elizabeth Gray, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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