Cochlear-implant listeners performed normally in tempo discrimination, but significantly poorer than normal-hearing listeners in rhythmic pattern identification and melody recognition. While both temporal (rhythmic) and spectral (pitch) cues contribute to melody recognition, cochlear-implant listeners mostly relied on the rhythmic cues for melody recognition. Without the rhythmic cues, high spectral resolution with as many as 32 bands was needed for melody recognition for normal-hearing listeners. This result indicates that the present cochlear implants provide sufficient spectral cues to support speech recognition in quiet, but they are not adequate to support music perception. Increasing the number of functional channels and improved encoding of the fine structure information are necessary to improve music perception for cochlear implant listeners.
People naturally move their heads when they speak, and our study shows that this rhythmic head motion conveys linguistic information. Three-dimensional head and face motion and the acoustics of a talker producing Japanese sentences were recorded and analyzed. The head movement correlated strongly with the pitch (fundamental frequency) and amplitude of the talker's voice. In a perception study, Japanese subjects viewed realistic talking-head animations based on these movement recordings in a speech-in-noise task. The animations allowed the head motion to be manipulated without changing other characteristics of the visual or acoustic speech. Subjects correctly identified more syllables when natural head motion was present in the animation than when it was eliminated or distorted. These results suggest that nonverbal gestures such as head movements play a more direct role in the perception of speech than previously known.
Short Summary
The primary goal of this study was to investigate how speech perception is altered by the provision of a preview or “prime” of a sample of speech just before it is presented in masking. A same-different test paradigm was developed to compare the benefit of priming in overcoming energetic and informational masking. Results demonstrated that priming was effective in improving speech perception with energetic maskers. It is less clear how much benefit from priming could be attributed to release from informational masking. Performance on the same-different task and an open-set speech recognition task with the same stimuli was linearly related.
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