Sources of decoding errors of the perceptual cues, in normal and hearing impaired ears
Abstract
After many decades of work it is not understood how the average normal- hearing (NH) ears, or significantly hearing-impaired (HI) ears, decode con- sonants. We wish to discover the strategy HI persons use to recognize consonants in a consonant-vowel (CV) context. To understand how NH ears decode consonants, we have repeated the classic consonant perception experiments of Fletcher, French and Steinberg, G.A. Miller, Furui, and others. This has given us access to the raw data (e.g., to allow for ANOVA testing) and the ability to verify many widely held (typically wrong) assumptions. The first lesson of this research is the sin of averaging: While audiology is built on average measures, most of the interesting information is lost in these averages. It has been shown, for example, that averaging across consonants is a grievous error, as is averaging across talkers for a given consonant. It will be shown how an average entropy measure (a measure of dispersion in probability) has higher utility than the average error.
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