Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2006 Apr;27(2):139-52.
doi: 10.1097/01.aud.0000202357.40662.85.

The right information may matter more than frequency-place alignment: simulations of frequency-aligned and upward shifting cochlear implant processors for a shallow electrode array insertion

Affiliations
Free article

The right information may matter more than frequency-place alignment: simulations of frequency-aligned and upward shifting cochlear implant processors for a shallow electrode array insertion

Andrew Faulkner et al. Ear Hear. 2006 Apr.
Free article

Abstract

Objective: It has been claimed that speech recognition with a cochlear implant is dependent on the correct frequency alignment of analysis bands in the speech processor with characteristic frequencies (CFs) at electrode locations. However, the use of filters aligned in frequency to a relatively basal electrode array position leads to significant loss of lower frequency speech information. This study uses an acoustic simulation to compare two approaches to the matching of speech processor filters to an electrode array having a relatively shallow depth within the typical range, such that the most apical element is at a CF of 1851 Hz. Two noise-excited vocoder speech processors are compared, one with CF-matched filters, and one with filters matched to CFs at basilar membrane locations 6 mm more apical than electrode locations.

Design: An extended crossover training design examined pre- and post-training performance in the identification of vowels and words in sentences for both processors. Subjects received about 3 hours of training with each processor in turn.

Results: Training improved performance with both processors, but training effects were greater for the shifted processor. For a male talker, the shifted processor led to higher post-training scores than the frequency-aligned processor with both vowels and sentences. For a female talker, post-training vowel scores did not differ significantly between processors, whereas sentence scores were higher with the frequency-aligned processor.

Conclusions: Even for a shallow electrode insertion, we conclude that a speech processor should represent information from important frequency regions below 1 kHz and that the possible cost of frequency misalignment can be significantly reduced with listening experience.

PubMed Disclaimer

Publication types