Pitch perception: Relationships between age, hearing loss, and perceptual mechanisms

Both age and hearing loss negatively impact fundamental-frequency (F0) encoding and its perceptual correlate, pitch, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Candidates include i) degraded frequency selectivity and ii) degraded auditory-nerve phase locking to stimulus temporal fine structure (TFS). We will relate the effects of age and hearing loss on complex pitch discrimination to measures of frequency selectivity and TFS processing. Abbreviations: IPD = Interaural phase difference F0 = Fundamental frequency F0DL = Fundamental-frequency difference limen 4PTA = 4-frequency pure-tone average TIN = Tone in noise detection TEN = Threshold-equalizing noise TFS = Temporal fine structure NH = normal-hearing (participants) HI = hearing-impaired (participants)