Physics Commons^™

The spectral center of gravity refers to a listener’s averaging of frequency and intensity components when formant peaks in a speechlike signal are separated by 3.5 Bark units or less. In this paper a total of 18 synthetic vowels whose spectra approximated /ae/ or /inverted vee/ were generated digitally; each stimulus contained the first 40 harmonics of a 100‐Hz fundamental. Nine spectra contained three formants, while the balance contained only two. Subjects with normal hearing and mild high‐frequency hearing loss above 3000 Hz were instructed to identify synthetic vowels as either /ae/ or /inverted vee/ as F2 frequency was …

Although much research has focused on the temporal, spectral, and intensity relationships between a masker and a suppressor, there has been little attention directed towards relative amounts of suppression in different frequency regions. The purpose of this experiment was to compare the magnitude of suppression at 500 and 2000 Hz in two forward‐masking experiments with seven normal‐hearing persons. In the first experiment, the threshold for a 10‐ms probe was determined as the bandwidth of a 400‐ms masker increased from 0.05 to 1.6 times the probe frequency. Suppression was determined by observing a decrease in threshold when the masker bandwidth exceeded …