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Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychophysical spectral resolution and sentence reception in various types of interfering backgrounds for listeners with cochlear implants and normal-hearing subjects listening to vocoded speech. Spectral resolution was measured w...

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Autores principales: Croghan, Naomi B. H., Smith, Zachary M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053854/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30022730
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518787276
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author Croghan, Naomi B. H.
Smith, Zachary M.
author_facet Croghan, Naomi B. H.
Smith, Zachary M.
author_sort Croghan, Naomi B. H.
collection PubMed
description The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychophysical spectral resolution and sentence reception in various types of interfering backgrounds for listeners with cochlear implants and normal-hearing subjects listening to vocoded speech. Spectral resolution was measured with a spectral modulation detection (SMD) task. For speech testing, maskers included stationary speech-shaped noise (SSN), four-talker babble, multitone noise, and a competing talker. To explore the possible trade-offs between spectral resolution and susceptibility to different types of maskers, the degree of simulated current spread was varied within the vocoder group, achieving a range of performance for SMD and speech tasks. Greater simulated current spread was detrimental to both spectral resolution and speech recognition, suggesting that interventions that decrease current spread may improve performance for both tasks. Better SMD sensitivity was significantly correlated with improved sentence reception. In addition, differences in sentence reception across the four maskers were significantly associated with SMD across the combined group of cochlear-implant and vocoder subjects. Masking release (MR) was quantified as the signal-to-noise ratio difference in speech reception threshold between the SSN and competing talker. Several individual cochlear-implant subjects demonstrated substantial MR, in contrast to previous studies, and the degree of MR increased with better SMD thresholds across subjects. The results of this study suggest that alternative masker types, particularly competing talkers, are more sensitive than stationary SSN to differences in spectral resolution in the cochlear-implant population.
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spelling pubmed-60538542018-07-23 Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release Croghan, Naomi B. H. Smith, Zachary M. Trends Hear Original Article The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychophysical spectral resolution and sentence reception in various types of interfering backgrounds for listeners with cochlear implants and normal-hearing subjects listening to vocoded speech. Spectral resolution was measured with a spectral modulation detection (SMD) task. For speech testing, maskers included stationary speech-shaped noise (SSN), four-talker babble, multitone noise, and a competing talker. To explore the possible trade-offs between spectral resolution and susceptibility to different types of maskers, the degree of simulated current spread was varied within the vocoder group, achieving a range of performance for SMD and speech tasks. Greater simulated current spread was detrimental to both spectral resolution and speech recognition, suggesting that interventions that decrease current spread may improve performance for both tasks. Better SMD sensitivity was significantly correlated with improved sentence reception. In addition, differences in sentence reception across the four maskers were significantly associated with SMD across the combined group of cochlear-implant and vocoder subjects. Masking release (MR) was quantified as the signal-to-noise ratio difference in speech reception threshold between the SSN and competing talker. Several individual cochlear-implant subjects demonstrated substantial MR, in contrast to previous studies, and the degree of MR increased with better SMD thresholds across subjects. The results of this study suggest that alternative masker types, particularly competing talkers, are more sensitive than stationary SSN to differences in spectral resolution in the cochlear-implant population. SAGE Publications 2018-07-19 /pmc/articles/PMC6053854/ /pubmed/30022730 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518787276 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Article
Croghan, Naomi B. H.
Smith, Zachary M.
Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title_full Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title_fullStr Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title_full_unstemmed Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title_short Speech Understanding With Various Maskers in Cochlear-Implant and Simulated Cochlear-Implant Hearing: Effects of Spectral Resolution and Implications for Masking Release
title_sort speech understanding with various maskers in cochlear-implant and simulated cochlear-implant hearing: effects of spectral resolution and implications for masking release
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053854/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30022730
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518787276
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