Identification and discrimination of vowel-consonant syllables in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss.

The speech encoding ability of eight persons with sensorineural hearing loss and three persons with normal hearing was studied in identification and discrimination paradigms. In the identification task a feature analysis of transmitted information for VC syllables was used to study encoding ability. Transmitted information was reduced from normal for persons with hearing loss, indicating a loss of ability to encode consonants. In the discrimination task coding ability was studied by measuring reaction times (RTs) for "same" and "different" decisions. The RSs for individuals with impaired hearing were found to be significantly different from those subjects with normal hearing. The trend was for faster "same" than "different" RTs among the normal subjects and faster "different" than "same" RTs among the hearing-impaired persons. The results are interpreted as indicating that the two groups of subjects used different processing modes in discriminating between pairs of phonemes.