Aim:
To study auditory stream perception in sensorineural hearing loss using sinusoidally amplitude modulated signals (SAM).

Material and methods:
There were 30 participants with normal hearing and 30 participants with SNHL who participated in the study. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment I, an AB sequence of SAM stimuli was presented having a standard or reference modulation frequency in the A stimuli and a comparison or target modulation frequency in the B stimuli. In Experiment II, only a B stimuli sequence was presented. Both a low carrier frequency of 1 kHz and a high carrier frequency of 4 kHz were used in the experiment. A lower standard modulation frequency of 16 Hz and a higher standard modulation frequency of 256 Hz were considered. The comparison modulation frequencies ranged from 1 octave above to 4 octaves above the standard modulation frequencies. The objective listening task was to pick the irregularity in the rhythmic sequence when different levels of time delays were introduced, and this delay was used as a measure of stream perception.

Results:
There was a significant difference between the normal hearing group and the SNHL group in their ability to detect irregularities when higher standard modulation frequencies were used, irrespective of the carrier frequencies. The SNHL group identified the irregularities better than the normal hearing group, indicating they had poorer stream perception.

Conclusions:
Poorer stream perception with sinusoidal amplitude modulated tonal stimuli in the SNHL group can be attributed to poorer frequency resolution in the SNHL group.