Low-frequency speech cues and simulated electric-acoustic hearing
- 1 March 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Vol. 125 (3), 1658-1665
- https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3068441
Abstract
The addition of low-frequency acoustic information to real or simulated electric stimulation (so-called electric-acoustic stimulation or EAS) often results in large improvements in intelligibility, particularly in competing backgrounds. This may reflect the availability of fundamental frequency (F0) information in the acoustic region. The contributions of F0 and the amplitude envelope (as well as voicing) of speech to simulated EAS was examined by replacing the low-frequency speech with a tone that was modulated in frequency to track the F0 of the speech, in amplitude with the envelope of the low-frequency speech, or both. A four-channel vocoder simulated electric hearing. Significant benefit over vocoder alone was observed with the addition of a tone carrying F0 or envelope cues, and both cues combined typically provided significantly more benefit than either alone. The intelligibility improvement over vocoder was between 24 and 57 percentage points, and was unaffected by the presence of a tone carrying these cues from a background talker. These results confirm the importance of the F0 of target speech for EAS (in simulation). They indicate that significant benefit can be provided by a tone carrying F0 and amplitude envelope cues. The results support a glimpsing account of EAS and argue against segregation.Keywords
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- A new approach to electric-acoustic stimulationThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
- Speech recognition with varying numbers and types of competing talkers by normal-hearing, cochlear-implant, and implant simulation subjectsThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
- Preservation of Hearing in Cochlear Implant Surgery: Advantages of Combined Electrical and Acoustical Speech ProcessingThe Laryngoscope, 2005
- Influence of fundamental frequency on stop-consonant voicing perception: A case of learned covariation or auditory enhancement?The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
- Development of speechreading supplements based on automatic speech recognitionIEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2000
- Perceptual separation of simultaneous vowels: Within and across-formant grouping by FThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1993
- Modeling the perception of concurrent vowels: Vowels with different fundamental frequenciesThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1990
- Voice Fundamental Frequency as an Auditory Supplement to the Speechreading of SentencesEar & Hearing, 1988
- Speech perception with the Vienna extra-cochlear single-channel implant: A comparison of two approaches to speech codingBritish Journal of Audiology, 1986
- Duration and Intensity as Physical Correlates of Linguistic StressThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1955