Cochlear implant speech recognition with speech maskers

Speech recognition performance was measured in normal-hearing and cochlear-implant listeners with maskers consisting of either steady-state speech-spectrum-shaped noise or a competing sentence. Target sentences from a male talker were presented in the presence of one of three competing talkers (same...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 116; no. 2; p. 1081
Main Authors Stickney, Ginger S, Zeng, Fan-Gang, Litovsky, Ruth, Assmann, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.08.2004
Subjects
Adult
Aged
Analysis of Variance
Cochlear Implants
Equipment Design
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Noise - adverse effects
Perceptual Masking - physiology
Speech Acoustics
Speech Perception - physiology
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Summary:Speech recognition performance was measured in normal-hearing and cochlear-implant listeners with maskers consisting of either steady-state speech-spectrum-shaped noise or a competing sentence. Target sentences from a male talker were presented in the presence of one of three competing talkers (same male, different male, or female) or speech-spectrum-shaped noise generated from this talker at several target-to-masker ratios. For the normal-hearing listeners, target-masker combinations were processed through a noise-excited vocoder designed to simulate a cochlear implant. With unprocessed stimuli, a normal-hearing control group maintained high levels of intelligibility down to target-to-masker ratios as low as 0 dB and showed a release from masking, producing better performance with single-talker maskers than with steady-state noise. In contrast, no masking release was observed in either implant or normal-hearing subjects listening through an implant simulation. The performance of the simulation and implant groups did not improve when the single-talker masker was a different talker compared to the same talker as the target speech, as was found in the normal-hearing control. These results are interpreted as evidence for a significant role of informational masking and modulation interference in cochlear implant speech recognition with fluctuating maskers. This informational masking may originate from increased target-masker similarity when spectral resolution is reduced.
ISSN:0001-4966
DOI:10.1121/1.1772399