title: Vowel and consonant confusions from spectrally manipulated stimuli designed to simulate poor cochlear implant electrode-neuron interfaces.
abstract: Suboptimal interfaces between cochlear implant (CI) electrodes and auditory neurons result in a loss or distortion of spectral information in specific frequency regions, which likely decreases CI users' speech identification performance. This study exploited speech acoustics to model regions of distorted CI frequency transmission to determine the perceptual consequences of suboptimal electrode-neuron interfaces. Normal hearing adults identified naturally spoken vowels and consonants after spectral information was manipulated through a noiseband vocoder: either (1) low-, middle-, or high-frequency regions of information were removed by zeroing the corresponding channel outputs, or (2) the same regions were distorted by splitting filter outputs to neighboring filters. These conditions simulated the detrimental effects of suboptimal CI electrode-neuron interfaces on spectral transmission. Vowel and consonant confusion patterns were analyzed with sequential information transmission, perceptual distance, and perceptual vowel space analyses. Results indicated that both types of spectral manipulation were equally destructive. Loss or distortion of frequency information produced similar effects on phoneme identification performance and confusion patterns. Consonant error patterns were consistently based on place of articulation. Vowel confusions showed that perceptions gravitated away from the degraded frequency region in a predictable manner, indicating that vowels can probe frequency-specific regions of spectral degradations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, 1417 NE 42nd Street, Box 354875, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA.
authors.forename: Mishaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: DiNino
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Guggenheim Hall, Box 352425, Seattle, Washington, 98195, USA.
authors.forename: Richard A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, 1417 NE 42nd Street, Box 354875, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Winn
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, 1417 NE 42nd Street, Box 354875, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA.
authors.forename: Julie Arenberg
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Bierer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003051:Cochlea; D019929:Cochlear Implantation; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009474:Neurons; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult