Influence of voice similarity on talker discrimination in children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants.
The perception of voice similarity was examined in 5-year-old children with normal hearing sensitivity and in pediatric cochlear implant users, 5-12 years of age. Recorded sentences were manipulated to form a continuum of similar-sounding voices. An adaptive procedure was then used to determine how acoustically different, in terms of average fundamental and formant frequencies, 2 sentences needed to be for a child to categorize the sentences as spoken by 2 different talkers. The average spectral characteristics of 2 utterances (including their fundamental frequencies) needed to differ by at least 11%-16% (2-2.5 semitones) for normal-hearing children to perceive the voices as belonging to different talkers. Introducing differences in the linguistic content of the 2 sentences to be compared did not change performance. Although several children with cochlear implants performed similarly to normal-hearing children, most found the task very difficult. Pediatric cochlear implant users who scored above the group mean of 64% of words correct on a monosyllabic open-set word identification task categorized the voices more like children with normal hearing sensitivity.
Cleary
Miranda
M
Indiana University-Bloomington, USA. mcleary@gc.cuny.edu
Pisoni
David B
DB
Kirk
Karen Iler
KI
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003638:Deafness / Q000601:surgery*; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014831:Voice