title: The perception of prosody and speaker gender in normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant recipients.
abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of altering the fundamental frequency (F0) on perception of prosody and speaker gender in both normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant (CI) recipients. Tests with natural speech and defined modifications of the F0 were performed, and the resulting changes in perception were measured. Compared to the normal-hearing listeners, most of the CI users exhibited worse outcomes, especially for sentence stress. In contrast, the speaker gender tests yielded similar results for both groups when artificially modifying the F0 contour. The results seemed to be strongly related to the duration of alterations in F0. Although the perception of prosodic cues was limited in most of the CI recipients, they showed qualitatively similar results to normal-hearing listeners in that the boundary between questions and statements and between female and male voices was comparable. A large inter-individual difference in performance was observed among the CI recipients, which could not be attributed to different processor or implant types or to other factors such as implant experience.
authors.affiliation: Jean Uhrmacher Institute for Clinical ENT Research, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany. hartmut.meister@uni-koeln.de
authors.forename: Hartmut
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Meister
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Landwehr
authors.forename: Verena
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Pyschny
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Walger
authors.forename: Hasso
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: von Wedel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D019929:Cochlear Implantation; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D012737:Sex Factors; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors