The Relationship Between Spectral Modulation Detection and Speech Recognition: Adult Versus Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients

Abstract

Adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients demonstrate a reliable relationship between spectral modulation detection and speech understanding. Prior studies documenting this relationship have focused on postlingually deafened adult CI recipients—leaving an open question regarding the relationship between spectral resolution and speech understanding for adults and children with prelingual onset of deafness. Here, we report CI performance on the measures of speech recognition and spectral modulation detection for 578 CI recipients including 477 postlingual adults, 65 prelingual adults, and 36 prelingual pediatric CI users. The results demonstrated a significant correlation between spectral modulation detection and various measures of speech understanding for 542 adult CI recipients. For 36 pediatric CI recipients, however, there was no significant correlation between spectral modulation detection and speech understanding in quiet or in noise nor was spectral modulation detection significantly correlated with listener age or age at implantation. These findings suggest that pediatric CI recipients might not depend upon spectral resolution for speech understanding in the same manner as adult CI recipients. It is possible that pediatric CI users are making use of different cues, such as those contained within the temporal envelope, to achieve high levels of speech understanding. Further investigation is warranted to investigate the relationship between spectral and temporal resolution and speech recognition to describe the underlying mechanisms driving peripheral auditory processing in pediatric CI users.

Looking for Mickey Mouse™ But Finding a Munchkin: The Perceptual Effects of Frequency Upshifts for Single-Sided Deaf, Cochlear Implant Patients

“…As shown in Table 3, using a direct connect cable for audio input to the CI, two of the three listeners (Patients 2460 and 2465) had better than average scores on tests of speech understanding, for example, 76%-77% correct on AzBio sentences in quiet, whereas one had a poor score of −18% correct. Gifford et al (2018) report a mean score of 63% correct for the AzBio sentences in quiet for a sample of 453 CI patients. The two patients with good speech understanding scores were able to locate a wide band noise on the horizontal plane with accuracy appropriate for an SSD-CI listener, that is, 25°-28°of error (Dorman, Loiselle, Cook, Yost, & Gifford, 2016;see Yost, Loiselle, Dorman, Burns, & Brown, 2013, for a description of the test environment).…”

Performance with an Auditory Brainstem Implant and Contralateral Cochlear Implant in Pediatric Patients

“…It is also worth noting that while spectral resolution with a CI is highly correlated with speech understanding in many studies, a recent paper [Gifford et al, 2018] with a very large number of subjects failed to find any relationship between spectral resolution and speech understanding. It is presumed that congenitally deafened children with implants do not depend on spectral resolution as much as adults.…”

Hand Gesture Recognition Using an IR-UWB Radar with an Inception Module-Based Classifier

“…Speech recognition can also provide an interactive HCI environment. However, the tonal and physical variations, such as background noise, have a drastic effect on the recognition accuracy [7]. In order to deal with these concerns, wearable devices such as gloves may well provide an opportunity.…”