Amp Up Your Skills with the 2026 Aural Rehab Exam 2 Practice Test – Tune Into Success!

Temporal masking is the phenomenon where a sound (the masker) makes it harder to hear another sound (the signal) because they occur very close in time. If the masker is about to appear before the signal, or has just disappeared after the signal, its temporal proximity reduces the detectability of the signal. This covers both forward masking (masker before the signal) and backward masking (masker after the signal), and both are forms of temporal masking. The other concepts don’t focus on how timing of adjacent sounds affects perception: temporal ordering is about the sequence of sounds, temporal integration is about summing energy over time to reach a threshold, and auditory discrimination is about distinguishing between different sounds in general.