1989 Volume 32 Issue 2 Pages 130-136
The effects of temporal factors on the vowel perception of the sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners were examined. In the experiment, the ability to identify Japanese five vowels with various durations and two-vowel sequences with various inter-vowel intervals were examined. For isolated vowel perception, the shorter the vowel segment was, the lower the intelligibility was. Although the intelligibility of individual vowels of the sequences tends to be lower than that for isolated vowels, it tends to improve with a silent interval between the vowels becomes longer. These results indicate that the vowel perception of sensorineural hearing-impaired is easily affected by the temporal factors in the stimuli. This indicates that the temporal processing in auditory system of the hearing-impaired is reduced.