TY - JOUR
T1 - Contribution of low-frequency acoustic information to Chinese speech recognition in cochlear implant simulations
AU - Luo, Xin
AU - Fu, Qian Jie
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to all subjects for their participation in these experiments. We thank John J. Galvin III for editorial assistance. We would also like to thank Dr. Fan-Gang Zeng, Dr. Andrew Faulkner, and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. Research was supported in part by NIH (DC-004993).
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Chinese sentence recognition strongly relates to the reception of tonal information. For cochlear implant (CI) users with residual acoustic hearing, tonal information may be enhanced by restoring low-frequency acoustic cues in the nonimplanted ear. The present study investigated the contribution of low-frequency acoustic information to Chinese speech recognition in Mandarin-speaking normal-hearing subjects listening to acoustic simulations of bilaterally combined electric and acoustic hearing. Subjects listened to a 6-channel CI simulation in one ear and low-pass filtered speech in the other ear. Chinese tone, phoneme, and sentence recognition were measured in steady-state, speech-shaped noise, as a function of the cutoff frequency for low-pass filtered speech. Results showed that low-frequency acoustic information below 500 Hz contributed most strongly to tone recognition, while low-frequency acoustic information above 500 Hz contributed most strongly to phoneme recognition. For Chinese sentences, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) improved with increasing amounts of low-frequency acoustic information, and significantly improved when low-frequency acoustic information above 500 Hz was preserved. SRTs were not significantly affected by the degree of spectral overlap between the CI simulation and low-pass filtered speech. These results suggest that, for CI patients with residual acoustic hearing, preserving low-frequency acoustic information can improve Chinese speech recognition in noise.
AB - Chinese sentence recognition strongly relates to the reception of tonal information. For cochlear implant (CI) users with residual acoustic hearing, tonal information may be enhanced by restoring low-frequency acoustic cues in the nonimplanted ear. The present study investigated the contribution of low-frequency acoustic information to Chinese speech recognition in Mandarin-speaking normal-hearing subjects listening to acoustic simulations of bilaterally combined electric and acoustic hearing. Subjects listened to a 6-channel CI simulation in one ear and low-pass filtered speech in the other ear. Chinese tone, phoneme, and sentence recognition were measured in steady-state, speech-shaped noise, as a function of the cutoff frequency for low-pass filtered speech. Results showed that low-frequency acoustic information below 500 Hz contributed most strongly to tone recognition, while low-frequency acoustic information above 500 Hz contributed most strongly to phoneme recognition. For Chinese sentences, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) improved with increasing amounts of low-frequency acoustic information, and significantly improved when low-frequency acoustic information above 500 Hz was preserved. SRTs were not significantly affected by the degree of spectral overlap between the CI simulation and low-pass filtered speech. These results suggest that, for CI patients with residual acoustic hearing, preserving low-frequency acoustic information can improve Chinese speech recognition in noise.
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U2 - 10.1121/1.2336990
DO - 10.1121/1.2336990
M3 - Article
C2 - 17069321
AN - SCOPUS:33749563862
SN - 0001-4966
VL - 120
SP - 2260
EP - 2266
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
IS - 4
ER -