Influence of temporal masking on click-pair discriminability

When temporal auditory acuity is estimated using time-reversed click pairs, the asymmetry of temporal masking may influence the results. To investigate this hypothesis, we first established normal-hearing listeners’ psychometric functions for the discrimination of time-reversed click pairs. An attempt to relate listeners’ performances in click-pair discrimination to their performances in forward and backward masking tasks was unsuccessful, probably due to the presence of spectral artifact in the temporal masking paradigms. We then investigated listeners’ abilities to discriminate time-reversed click pairs in which the intensity of the lower level click in one pair was altered. This alteration was introduced at random in order to minimize the influence of spectral artifact. Our results suggest that the course of temporal masking influenced the discriminability of the modified click pairs. Thus, the discrimination of time-reversed click pairs may yield a biased estimate of auditory temporal acuity.