The Perception of Sentence Stress in Cochlear Implant Recipients

Abstract

The outcome emphasizes the importance of both F0 and intensity for CI users' identification of sentence-based stress. Both cues were used separately for stress perception, but combining the cues provided extra benefit for most of the subjects.

Expansion of Prosodic Abilities at the Transition From Babble to Words: A Comparison Between Children With Cochlear Implants and Normally Hearing Children

“…17 This increase is evident in all children with CI and in seven out of the nine NH children 18 (Table 4). 19 …”

“…Since participants in this study were highly mobile and clip-on microphones were 16 not used, we controlled for possible problematic intensity values by applying rigid 17 selection criteria, cleaning the collected dataset for outliers and most importantly: by 18 computing the ratio between the intensity measurements of the two syllables. The 19 purpose of this study was to investigate the acoustic differentiation between syllables of 20 utterances. Therefore, a ratio between the measurements in each syllable was computed 21 to quantify this differentiation (i.e.…”

“…This meant that the two syllables of the 17 utterance had to occur within the same intonation contour or adjacent to a prosodic break 18 such as a pause or an inbreath at the beginning of a new breath group (Lieberman, 1984). 19 Furthermore, disyllables had to be separated from surrounding speech by a silence of at 20 least 400 ms with an intersyllabic pause of less than 400 ms. For a small number of items 21 produced at a low speech rate, the pause criterion was relaxed up to 500ms as long as the 22 two syllables were part of a single intonation contour, indicating cohesion. Disyllables 23 were excluded if there was concurrent speech or noise or if they were produced with a 24 creaky, breathy, excessively loud or whispery voice.…”

“…Prosody 16 was deemed a particular area of interest because it is highly important in typical language 17 acquisition (Morgan & Demuth, 1996), but the implant only provides a significantly 18 degraded input for two of the acoustic cues to prosody (Moore, 2003). For children with 19 CI, an exploration of top-down processes on language acquisition is particularly relevant, 20 as these could in principle be used to counter the inherent limitations in signal processing 21 of the implant. Indeed, recent theories of language development have emphasised bi -22 directional relations between earlier more basic processes and the acquisition of later, 23…”

Low-frequency fine-structure cues allow for the online use of lexical stress during spoken-word recognition in spectrally degraded speech

“…Also, the perception of prosody is generally poorer in CI users compared to normalhearing listeners (e.g., Holt and McDermott, 2013;Holt et al, 2016;Marx et al, 2015;Meister et al, 2009Meister et al, , 2011Morris et al, 2013;Peng et al, 2008Peng et al, , 2009. Although the temporal envelope of speech carries information related to duration, pauses, and amplitude, the reduced spectral and temporal resolution in CI listening (e.g., Oxenham and Kreft, 2014) negatively impact the perception of prosody.…”