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. 2011 Oct;130(4):2054-62.
doi: 10.1121/1.3631563.

Fundamental frequency is critical to speech perception in noise in combined acoustic and electric hearing

Jeff Carroll  1 , Stephanie Tiaden, Fan-Gang Zeng
Affiliations

Fundamental frequency is critical to speech perception in noise in combined acoustic and electric hearing

Jeff Carroll et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Oct.

Abstract

Cochlear implant (CI) users have been shown to benefit from residual low-frequency hearing, specifically in pitch related tasks. It remains unclear whether this benefit is dependent on fundamental frequency (F0) or other acoustic cues. Three experiments were conducted to determine the role of F0, as well as its frequency modulated (FM) and amplitude modulated (AM) components, in speech recognition with a competing voice. In simulated CI listeners, the signal-to-noise ratio was varied to estimate the 50% correct response. Simulation results showed that the F0 cue contributes to a significant proportion of the benefit seen with combined acoustic and electric hearing, and additionally that this benefit is due to the FM rather than the AM component. In actual CI users, sentence recognition scores were collected with either the full F0 cue containing both the FM and AM components or the 500-Hz low-pass speech cue containing the F0 and additional harmonics. The F0 cue provided a benefit similar to the low-pass cue for speech in noise, but not in quiet. Poorer CI users benefited more from the F0 cue than better users. These findings suggest that F0 is critical to improving speech perception in noise in combined acoustic and electric hearing.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Waveforms (left panels) and spectrograms (right panels) of a sample sentence. The rows from top to bottom show the original speech, a low-passed version at 500 Hz (lowpass), the F0 contour (named target F0 in exp. 1 or FM and AM in exp. 2), the frequency modulation of the F0 contour (FM only), the amplitude modulation of the F0 contour (AM only), or a sine wave cueing the presence of voicing (stationary).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Speech recognition as a function of different low-frequency listening conditions in simulated combined hearing. SRTn values represent the SNR at which the subjects scored 50% correct for each condition. Asterisks indicate statistical significance (p < 0.05).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Speech recognition as a function of different F0 cues in simulated combined hearing. SRTn values represent the SNR at which the subjects scored 50% correct for each stimulus condition. Asterisks indicate statistical significance (p < 0.05).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Audiograms for nine cochlear-implant users with residual hearing in their contralateral ear. NR indicates no response.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Cochlear-implant speech recognition in percent-correct scores combined with three low-pass listening conditions in quiet or at a 10 dB SNR. Asterisks indicate statistical significance (p < 0.05).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Correlations between individual CI only scores and benefits of the added low-frequency information under four listening conditions. Solid lines indicate the linear regression to the data.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Performance between good users (CI only scores in quiet better than 85%) and average users (CI only scores in quiet less than 85%). Asterisks indicate statistical significance (p < 0.05).
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