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. 2024 Mar 1;155(3):1631-1640.
doi: 10.1121/10.0025011.

Lexical effects on talker discrimination in adult cochlear implant usersa)

Terrin N Tamati  1   2 , Almut Jebens  2 , Deniz Başkent  2   3
Affiliations

Lexical effects on talker discrimination in adult cochlear implant usersa)

Terrin N Tamati et al. J Acoust Soc Am. .

Abstract

The lexical and phonological content of an utterance impacts the processing of talker-specific details in normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Adult cochlear implant (CI) users demonstrate difficulties in talker discrimination, particularly for same-gender talker pairs, which may alter the reliance on lexical information in talker discrimination. The current study examined the effect of lexical content on talker discrimination in 24 adult CI users. In a remote AX talker discrimination task, word pairs-produced either by the same talker (ST) or different talkers with the same (DT-SG) or mixed genders (DT-MG)-were either lexically easy (high frequency, low neighborhood density) or lexically hard (low frequency, high neighborhood density). The task was completed in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB). Results showed an effect of lexical difficulty on talker discrimination, for same-gender talker pairs in both quiet and MTB. CI users showed greater sensitivity in quiet as well as less response bias in both quiet and MTB for lexically easy words compared to lexically hard words. These results suggest that CI users make use of lexical content in same-gender talker discrimination, providing evidence for the contribution of linguistic information to the processing of degraded talker information by adult CI users.

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Conflict of interest statement

T.N.T. received grant support from Cochlear Americas for an unrelated investigator-initiated study. All other authors have no conflicts to disclose.

Figures

FIG. 1.
FIG. 1.
Talker discrimination accuracy (% correct) by talker condition (ST, DT-SG, DT-MG) and lexical condition (easy, hard) in quiet (left panel) and MTB (right panel). The boxes extend from the lower to the upper quartile (the interquartile range, IQ), the solid midline indicates the median, and the black plus sign indicates the mean. The whiskers indicate the highest and lowest values no greater than 1.5 times the IQ. Individual data points are represented by the light gray circles. Chance level of performance from random guessing (50%) is indicated by the light gray dashed line.
FIG. 2.
FIG. 2.
Sensitivity scores (d-prime) by lexical condition (easy, hard) and listening condition (quiet, MTB). The boxes extend from the lower to the upper quartile (the interquartile range, IQ), the solid midline indicates the median, and the black plus sign indicates the mean. The whiskers indicate the highest and lowest values no greater than 1.5 times the IQ. Individual data points are represented by the light gray circles.
FIG. 3.
FIG. 3.
Response bias (beta) by lexical condition (easy, hard) and listening condition (quiet, MTB). The boxes extend from the lower to the upper quartile (the interquartile range, IQ), the solid midline indicates the median, and the black plus sign indicates the mean. The whiskers indicate the highest and lowest values no greater than 1.5 times the IQ. Individual data points are represented by the light gray circles.
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