title: The effect of visual cues on top-down restoration of temporally interrupted speech, with and without further degradations.
abstract: In complex listening situations, cognitive restoration mechanisms are commonly used to enhance perception of degraded speech with inaudible segments. Profoundly hearing-impaired people with a cochlear implant (CI) show less benefit from such mechanisms. However, both normal hearing (NH) listeners and CI users do benefit from visual speech cues in these listening situations. In this study we investigated if an accompanying video of the speaker can enhance the intelligibility of interrupted sentences and the phonemic restoration benefit, measured by an increase in intelligibility when the silent intervals are filled with noise. Similar to previous studies, restoration benefit was observed with interrupted speech without spectral degradations (Experiment 1), but was absent in acoustic simulations of CIs (Experiment 2) and was present again in simulations of electric-acoustic stimulation (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the additional speech information provided by the complementary visual cues lead to overall higher intelligibility, however, these cues did not influence the occurrence or extent of the phonemic restoration benefit of filler noise. Results imply that visual cues do not show a synergistic effect with the filler noise, as adding them equally increased the intelligibility of interrupted sentences with or without the filler noise.
authors.affiliation: Pento Audiology Center Zwolle, Oosterlaan 20, 8011 GC Zwolle, The Netherlands; University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, PO Box 30.001, 9700 RB Groningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: m.r.benard@umcg.nl.
authors.forename: Michel R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Benard
authors.affiliation: University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, PO Box 30.001, 9700 RB Groningen, The Netherlands; University of Groningen, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences, Antonius Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: d.baskent@umcg.nl.
authors.forename: Deniz
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Başkent
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000162:Acoustics; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003463:Cues; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006309:Hearing; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cochlear implants; Phonemic restoration; Speech perception; Top-down restoration; Visual speech cues