The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the role of voice onset time (VOT) on the discrimination of voiceless explosive monosylable sounds, /pa/, /ta/, /ka/, and to search the cue which improves the speech sounds perception of the presbycusis patients.
The VOTs were devided 3 and/or 4 parts along the time course by a digital deviding device, and the sound deleting the 1st part was designated as the processed sound 1. The sound deleting the 1st and 2nd parts was defined as the processed sound 2. The processed sound 3 lacked the 1st, and 2nd, 3rd parts and processed sound 4 had no parts of VOT. Concering jta/ and /ka/, the percentages of correct answer to the original sound and the processed sound 1 were almost 100% for the young normal subjects as a control.
The correct answer rate for the processed sound 2, /ta/ is 50%, and that of /ka/ is 79% on the normal subjects. The correct answer rates were 29% and 36% for the processed sound 3 of /ta/ and /ka/, respectively. For the processed sound 4, these rates decreased to 11% and 7%, respectively. These results demonstrated that the percentage of correct answer rate decreased as deleting part of VOT increased. The sound perception rate of original sound for /pa/ was 79% in healthty young adults.
Meanwhile, the percentages of correct answer of presbycusis are lower than normal hearing of young adults in every sound, that is, the percentage of correct answer of /pa/, /ta/, and /ka/, were 14%, 50%, and 71% for the original sounds. The correct answer rates for processed sound 1 were 29% in /ta/, and 36% in /ka/. The percentage of correct answer of /pa/ was so low as 14% even for original sound that the percentage showed no remarkable change and slightly reduced by processed sound.
These results indicated that the 1st and the 3rd parts of VOT contributed to the percentage of correct answer for /pa/ sound, and the first one-third of VOT was not so important for /ta/ and /ka/, on young normal hearing subjects. Contrary to this, the first one-thirds of VOT is important on presbycusis for /ta/ and /ka/ sounds. For /pa/ sound, perception was much poorer than normal subject
Then, analysis of VOT importance in presbycusis was impossible for /pa/ sound.
From these results, it is suggested that the mechanism of sound perception on voiceless explosive monosylable sound, is different between young adults with normal hearing and presbycusis patients.
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