ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

3pPP2. Loudness functions in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

Lidia W. Lee

Dept. of Commun. Disorders, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb, IL 60115

Larry E. Humes

Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN 47405

This paper examined whether an excitation-pattern model of loudness could adequately describe the growth of loudness for complex stimuli presented to normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in quiet and in noise. The loudness-growth functions were obtained for three synthesized steady-state vowels (/a,i,u/), each with two talkers (male: F0=120 Hz; female: F0=200 Hz), and for several pure tones (125--4000 Hz). All stimuli were presented, at random, from 2 to 90 dB SPL (in 4-dB steps) in quiet and in broadband noise. Magnitude estimation were used to measure the loudness of each stimulus. These data are used to evaluate the predictions of an excitation-pattern model [modified power-law model, L. Humes and W. Jesteadt, 1285--1294 (1989)]. [Work supported by NIA.]