Impaired listeners' discrimination of speech presented dichotically through high- and low-pass filters

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Abstract
Fifty-word phonetically balanced word lists were presented to hearing-impaired subjects dichotically, with the signal going to one ear high-pass filtered above 780 Hz (HP), and the same signal simultaneously presented to the other ear through a low-pass filter with the same cutoff frequency (LP). Performance with this split-signal presentation was compared to both unfiltered diotic and HP diotic presentations. The split-signal scheme did not show a significant advantage over both the unfiltered and HP diotic presentations in any of the 22 impaired subjects tested; in one subject it showed a significant disadvantage. Group differences were near zero for 16 subjects tested at the presumed maximum of their performance-intensity function and showed only a weak (insignificant) advantage for the split-signal scheme over the unfiltered presentation when the most comfortable level and the best of three filter cutoff frequencies were chosen individually for six subjects. The conclusion was drawn that the split-signal presentation neither increases nor decreases word discrimination scores at relatively high levels in quiet in a predominantly older population.

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