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,