Psychoacoustic and Phoneme Identification Measures in Cochlear-Implant and Normal-Hearing Listeners

• Published in: Trends in amplification 2013-03, Vol.17 (1), p.27-44
• Main Authors: Goldsworthy, Ray L., Delhorne, Lorraine A., Braida, Louis D., Reed, Charlotte M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Analysis of Variance; Audiometry, Pure-Tone; Audiometry, Speech; Case-Control Studies; Cochlear Implantation - instrumentation; Cochlear Implants; Correction of Hearing Impairment - instrumentation; Correction of Hearing Impairment - methods; Correlation analysis; Electric Stimulation; Female; Hearing Loss - diagnosis; Hearing Loss - psychology; Hearing Loss - rehabilitation; Humans; Male; Masking; Middle Aged; Noise; Noise - adverse effects; Perception; Perceptual Masking; Persons With Hearing Impairments - psychology; Persons With Hearing Impairments - rehabilitation; Phonemes; Phonetics; Pitch Discrimination; Psychoacoustics; Recognition (Psychology); Spectra; Speech Acoustics; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Perception; Tasks; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1084-7138; 1940-5588
• DOI: 10.1177/1084713813477244

The purpose of this study is to identify precise and repeatable measures for assessing cochlear-implant (CI) hearing. The study presents psychoacoustic and phoneme identification measures in CI and normal-hearing (NH) listeners, with correlations between measures examined. Psychoacoustic measures included pitch discrimination tasks using pure tones, harmonic complexes, and tone pips; intensity perception tasks included intensity discrimination for tones and modulation detection; spectral-temporal masking tasks included gap detection, forward and backward masking, tone-on-tone masking, synthetic formant-on-formant masking, and tone in noise detection. Phoneme perception measures included vowel and consonant identification in quiet and stationary and temporally gated speech-shaped noise. Results on psychoacoustic measures illustrate the effects of broader filtering in CI hearing contributing to reduced pitch perception and increased spectral masking. Results on consonant and vowel identification measures illustrate a wide range in performance across CI listeners. They also provide further evidence that CI listeners obtain little to no release of masking in temporally gated noise compared to stationary noise. The forward and backward-masking measures had the highest correlation with the phoneme identification measures for CI listeners. No significant correlations between speech reception and psychoacoustic measures were observed for NH listeners. The superior NH performance on measures of phoneme identification, especially in the presence of background noise, is a key difference between groups.