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
. 2024 Jul 5;28(3):e492-e501.
doi: 10.1055/s-0044-1785456. eCollection 2024 Jul.

Contribution of Temporal Fine Structure Cues to Concurrent Vowel Identification and Perception of Zebra Speech

Delora Samantha Serrao  1 , Nikhitha Theruvan  2 , Hasna Fathima  3   4 , Arivudai Nambi Pitchaimuthu  3   5
Affiliations

Contribution of Temporal Fine Structure Cues to Concurrent Vowel Identification and Perception of Zebra Speech

Delora Samantha Serrao et al. Int Arch Otorhinolaryngol. .

Abstract

Introduction The limited access to temporal fine structure (TFS) cues is a reason for reduced speech-in-noise recognition in cochlear implant (CI) users. The CI signal processing schemes like electroacoustic stimulation (EAS) and fine structure processing (FSP) encode TFS in the low frequency whereas theoretical strategies such as frequency amplitude modulation encoder (FAME) encode TFS in all the bands. Objective The present study compared the effect of simulated CI signal processing schemes that either encode no TFS, TFS information in all bands, or TFS only in low-frequency bands on concurrent vowel identification (CVI) and Zebra speech perception (ZSP). Methods Temporal fine structure information was systematically manipulated using a 30-band sine-wave (SV) vocoder. The TFS was either absent (SV) or presented in all the bands as frequency modulations simulating the FAME algorithm or only in bands below 525 Hz to simulate EAS. Concurrent vowel identification and ZSP were measured under each condition in 15 adults with normal hearing. Results The CVI scores did not differ between the 3 schemes (F (2, 28) = 0.62, p = 0.55, η 2 p = 0.04). The effect of encoding TFS was observed for ZSP (F (2, 28) = 5.73, p = 0.008, η 2 p = 0.29). Perception of Zebra speech was significantly better with EAS and FAME than with SV. There was no significant difference in ZSP scores obtained with EAS and FAME ( p = 1.00) Conclusion For ZSP, the TFS cues from FAME and EAS resulted in equivalent improvements in performance compared to the SV scheme. The presence or absence of TFS did not affect the CVI scores.

Keywords: algorithm; auditory processing; cochlear implant; hearing loss; psychoacoustics; speech perception.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interests The authors have no conflict of interests to declare.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The mean and standard deviation of d-primes for each vowel processed through sine-wave vocoder (SV), Frequency and amplitude modulation encoder (FAME), and electroacoustic stimulation (EAS) (top left: vowel ‘e’, top right: vowel ‘i’, bottom left: vowel ‘o’, bottom right: vowel ‘u’)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Smith Z M, Delgutte B, Oxenham A J. Chimaeric sounds reveal dichotomies in auditory perception. Nature. 2002;416(6876):87–90. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Shannon R V, Zeng F G, Kamath V, Wygonski J, Ekelid M. Speech recognition with primarily temporal cues. Science. 1995;270(5234):303–304. - PubMed
    1. Loizou P C, Dorman M, Tu Z.On the number of channels needed to understand speech J Acoust Soc Am 1999106(4 Pt 1):2097–2103. - PubMed
    1. Xu L, Zheng Y. Spectral and temporal cues for phoneme recognition in noise. J Acoust Soc Am. 2007;122(03):1758. - PubMed
    1. Friesen L M, Shannon R V, Baskent D, Wang X. Speech recognition in noise as a function of the number of spectral channels: comparison of acoustic hearing and cochlear implants. J Acoust Soc Am. 2001;110(02):1150–1163. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources