TY - JOUR
T1 - Processing F0 with cochlear implants
T2 - Modulation frequency discrimination and speech intonation recognition
AU - Chatterjee, Monita
AU - Peng, Shu Chen
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the cochlear implant listeners who participated in this study for their ongoing support of our research. We are very grateful to Dr. Qian-Jie Fu for the use of his software for processing the stimuli and for controlling the phoneme recognition tasks. We thank Kelly Hoffard for her help with some of the data collection. Mark E. Robert and Shubhasish B. Kundu are thanked for software support. We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD Grant Nos. R01 DC 04786 (PI: MC) and P30-DC004664 (PI: Robert Dooling).
PY - 2008/1
Y1 - 2008/1
N2 - Fundamental frequency (F0) processing by cochlear implant (CI) listeners was measured using a psychophysical task and a speech intonation recognition task. Listeners' Weber fractions for modulation frequency discrimination were measured using an adaptive, 3-interval, forced-choice paradigm: stimuli were presented through a custom research interface. In the speech intonation recognition task, listeners were asked to indicate whether resynthesized bisyllabic words, when presented in the free field through the listeners' everyday speech processor, were question-like or statement-like. The resynthesized tokens were systematically manipulated to have different initial-F0s to represent male vs. female voices, and different F0 contours (i.e. falling, flat, and rising) Although the CI listeners showed considerable variation in performance on both tasks, significant correlations were observed between the CI listeners' sensitivity to modulation frequency in the psychophysical task and their performance in intonation recognition. Consistent with their greater reliance on temporal cues, the CI listeners' performance in the intonation recognition task was significantly poorer with the higher initial-F0 stimuli than with the lower initial-F0 stimuli. Similar results were obtained with normal hearing listeners attending to noiseband-vocoded CI simulations with reduced spectral resolution.
AB - Fundamental frequency (F0) processing by cochlear implant (CI) listeners was measured using a psychophysical task and a speech intonation recognition task. Listeners' Weber fractions for modulation frequency discrimination were measured using an adaptive, 3-interval, forced-choice paradigm: stimuli were presented through a custom research interface. In the speech intonation recognition task, listeners were asked to indicate whether resynthesized bisyllabic words, when presented in the free field through the listeners' everyday speech processor, were question-like or statement-like. The resynthesized tokens were systematically manipulated to have different initial-F0s to represent male vs. female voices, and different F0 contours (i.e. falling, flat, and rising) Although the CI listeners showed considerable variation in performance on both tasks, significant correlations were observed between the CI listeners' sensitivity to modulation frequency in the psychophysical task and their performance in intonation recognition. Consistent with their greater reliance on temporal cues, the CI listeners' performance in the intonation recognition task was significantly poorer with the higher initial-F0 stimuli than with the lower initial-F0 stimuli. Similar results were obtained with normal hearing listeners attending to noiseband-vocoded CI simulations with reduced spectral resolution.
KW - Cochlear implants
KW - Modulation frequency discrimination
KW - Prosody
KW - Speech intonation
KW - Voice pitch
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U2 - 10.1016/j.heares.2007.11.004
DO - 10.1016/j.heares.2007.11.004
M3 - Article
C2 - 18093766
AN - SCOPUS:37549071064
VL - 235
SP - 143
EP - 156
JO - Hearing Research
JF - Hearing Research
SN - 0378-5955
IS - 1-2
ER -