Performance-intensity functions at absolute and masked thresholds

Abstract

In most applications of audibility and articulation theories, it is assumed that absolute thresholds and thermal noise maskers affect speech recognition performance-intensity (P-I) functions similarly. The purpose of this study was to evaluate that assumption. Performance-intensity functions for NU-6 monosyllabic words were obtained from eight normal-hearing subjects in quiet and in the presence of two levels of a noise that produced masked pure-tone thresholds parallel to, but higher than, those of each individual in quiet. The results support the practice of treating absolute threshold as a noise-masked threshold in predictions of speech recognition performance.