Abstract
The reflex activating sounds consisted of a 1000Hz pure tone, and thirteen kinds of noise centered 1000Hz with bandwidth of 100, 250 and 1/3-octave frequencies in 500-5000Hz. The hockey stick regression method which is one of the two-phase regression analyses was used to estimate a critical bandwidth.
The existance of the critical bandwidth was confirmed in 81 subjects out of 89 with normal hearing acuity. The mean value and SD were 30.6±2.2dB (1148Hz).
The present method developed by the authors is one of the useful tools to estimate the critical bandwidth for AR, and the relation between the critical bandwidth for AR and that observed in psychophysical studies such as loudness summation or masking was discussed.
