The role of recovered envelope cues in the identification of temporal-fine-structure speech for hearing-impaired listeners

Abstract

Narrowband speech can be separated into fast temporal cues [temporal fine structure (TFS)], and slow amplitude modulations (envelope). Speech processed to contain only TFS leads to envelope recovery through cochlear filtering, which has been suggested to account for TFS-speech intelligibility for normal-hearing listeners. Hearing-impaired listeners have deficits with TFS-speech identification, but the contribution of recovered-envelope cues to these deficits is unknown. This was assessed for hearing-impaired listeners by measuring identification of disyllables processed to contain TFS or recovered-envelope cues. Hearing-impaired listeners performed worse than normal-hearing listeners, but TFS-speech intelligibility was accounted for by recovered-envelope cues for both groups.