Do Adults With Cochlear Implants Rely on Different Acoustic Cues for Phoneme Perception Than Adults With Normal Hearing?
Publication: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Volume 57, Number 2
Pages 566-582
Abstract
Purpose
Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but spectral structure less so. This study asked how well speech recognition is supported if CI users shift attention to salient cues not weighted strongly by native speakers.
Method
Twenty adults with CIs participated. The /bɑ/-/wɑ/ contrast was used because spectral and amplitude structure varies in correlated fashion for this contrast. Adults with normal hearing weight the spectral cue strongly but the amplitude cue negligibly. Three measurements were made: labeling decisions, spectral and amplitude discrimination, and word recognition.
Results
Outcomes varied across listeners: Some weighted the spectral cue strongly, some weighted the amplitude cue, and some weighted neither. Spectral discrimination predicted spectral weighting. Spectral weighting explained the most variance in word recognition. Age of onset of hearing loss predicted spectral weighting but not unique variance in word recognition.
Conclusion
The weighting strategies of listeners with normal hearing likely support speech recognition best, so efforts in implant design, fitting, and training should focus on developing those strategies.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
Volume 57 • Number 2 • April 2014
Pages: 566-582
PubMed: 24686722
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
History
- Received: Oct 11, 2012
- Revised: Mar 28, 2013
- Accepted: Jul 24, 2013
- Published in issue: Apr 1, 2014
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