Lidia W. Lee
Dept. of Commun. Disord., Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb, IL 60115-2899
Larry E. Humes
Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN 47405
This paper examined whether an excitation-pattern model of loudness could adequately describe the growth of loudness for complex stimuli presented to normal-hearing listeners in quiet and in noise. The loudness-growth functions were obtained for three synthesized steady-state vowels (/a,i,u/), each with two talkers (male: F0=120 Hz; female: F0=200 Hz), and for several pure tones (125--4000 Hz). All stimuli were presented, at random, from 2 to 90 dB SPL (in 4-dB steps) in quiet and in spectrally shaped noise. Magnitude estimation were used to measure the loudness of each stimulus. These data are used to evaluate the predictions of an excitation-pattern model [E. Zwicker and B. Scharf, Psychol. Rev. 72, 3--26 (1965)] and a simpler modified power-law model [L. Humes and W. Jesteadt, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 85, 1285--1294 (1989)]. [Work supported, in part, by NIA.]