Comparison of Combination Tone Perception Between Normal Hearing Listeners and The Hearing Impaired by Using Masking Technique

Abstract

The characteristics of combination tones produced by complex sounds and frequency modulated complex sounds were investigated by using a masking technique in five ears of normal hearing listeners and twenty-two ears of sensory-neural hearing impaired in order to analyze the auditory nonlinearity.
From the experimental results, it was found that the masking phenomena produced by the exisitence of combination tones appeared only in seven ears of the hearing impaired different from the normal hearing listeners.
The masking level increased at the frequency corresponding to the combination tone by using frequency modulated complex sounds than the frequency constant complex sounds in the normal listeners. This phenomenon did not appear in most of the hearing impaired.