The effects of hearing loss on growth-of-masking functions for sinusoidal and complex-tone maskers with differing phase spectra

Growth-of-masking (GOM) functions in forward masking (0-ms masker-signal delay) were measured for normally hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners using as maskers complex tones (harmonics 1–40, 100-Hz fundamental frequency) with components starting in cosine or random phase, and on-frequency sinusoids. The signal was a 20-ms sinusoid, usually with a frequency of 1 or 2 kHz. It is argued that differences in the slopes of the GOM functions for the random- and cosine-phase maskers provide a measure of the strength of compression in the cochlea. For the NH listeners and some of the HI listeners, the slopes were significantly greater for the random- than for the cosine-phase maskers, and for these listeners the slopes for the complex-tone maskers were less than for the sinusoidal maskers. For the remaining HI listeners, the slopes of the GOM functions were similar for all masker types. It is argued that these listeners had almost complete loss of cochlear compression. The GOM functions for the sinusoidal maskers had slopes between 0.45 and 0.78 and were typically in the range 0.6–0.7. The finding of slopes below one for listeners in whom cochlear compression was probably absent is not consistent with linear-integrator models of forward masking.