A crew of listeners with no more than "slight" hearing loss who exhibit binaural deficits also exhibit reduced amounts of binaural interference (vol 150, pg 2977, 2021)

Listeners having, at most, "slight" hearing loss, specifically those having absolute thresholds at 4 kHz exceeding 7.5 dB HL, have been shown to exhibit deficits in binaural detection that appear to stem from increased levels of stimulus-dependent, additive internal noise [Bernstein and Trahiotis (2016). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 140, 3540-3548; Bernstein and Trahiotis (2018). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 144, 292-307]. This study assessed whether such listeners exhibit greater susceptibility to "binaural interference." NoSo and NoSp tone-in-noise detection thresholds were measured for stimuli centered at 4 kHz in the absence of any interfering stimuli and in the presence of simultaneously gated diotic or interaurally uncorrelated noise centered at 500 Hz. Results indicated that listeners exhibiting elevated NoSp thresholds (typical of those in ">7.5 dB groups"), actually exhibit less binaural interference than do those exhibiting lower NoSp thresholds typical of those in "<= 7.5 dB HL" groups. That outcome cannot be explained by a "ceiling effect" stemming from interferer-induced loss of the ability to utilize binaural cues to detect the signal. The relatively smaller amounts of binaural interference exhibited by listeners with relatively elevated NoSp thresholds notwithstanding, it is argued that the interference they do exhibit may place them at a distinct disadvantage in everyday listening environments. (C) 2021 Acoustical Society of America.