Time-compression thresholds for Mandarin sentences in normal-hearing and cochlear implant listeners

Meng, Qinglin; Wang, Xianren; Cai, Yixi; Kong, Fanting; Buck, Alexa N; Yu, Guangzheng; Zheng, Nengheng; Schnupp, Jan W. H.

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2019.01.011

Cited by 12 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Three Mandarin Chinese recognition tasks were tested, i.e., time-compression threshold, sentence in noise recognition, sentence in reverberation recognition. The results for the four tasks with the two vocoders in these NH participants were compared with actual CI results from the first author’s previous experiments (Meng et al ., 2019) as well as some newly collected data in this work. These experiments were conducted following procedures approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Shenzhen University, China.…”

Section: Vocoders and Experiments Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in speech-shaped noise (SSN) and babble noise, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at which 50% of words could be recognized correctly, were measured using the Mandarin hearing in noise test (MHINT) corpus (Wong et al ., 2007). The TCT and SRT test procedures followed Experiment 2 of Meng et al ., (2019) exactly, in which ten CI subjects (9/10 adults) with various hearing histories were tested.…”

Section: Vocoders and Experiments Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Pulsatile Gaussian-Enveloped Tones (GET) Vocoders for Cochlear-Implant Simulation

Meng

Zhou

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Acoustic simulations of cochlear implants allow comprehensive evaluation of not only perceptual performance under impoverished listening conditions but also relative contributions of classical spectral and temporal cues to speech recognition. Conventional simulations use continuous sinusoidal or noise carriers, lacking the vital pulsatile characteristics in a typical cochlear-implant processing strategy. The present study employed Gaussian-enveloped tones (GETs) as a discrete carrier to simulate the electric pulse train in modern cochlear implants. Two types of GET vocoders were implemented and evaluated in normal-hearing listeners to compare their performance to actual cochlear-implant performance. In the first implementation, GETs with different durations were used to simulate electric current interaction across channels that produced vowel and consonant recognition similar to the actual cochlear-implant result. In the second implementation, a direct mapping from electric pulses to GETs was developed to simulate a widely-used clinical n-of-m strategy in cochlear implants. The GET processing simulated the actual implant speech in noise perception in terms of the overall trend, the absolute mean scores, and their standard deviations. The present results demonstrated that the pulsatile GET vocoders simulate the cochlear implant performance more accurately than the conventional sinusoid or noise vocoders.

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Section: Vocoders and Experiments Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Vocoders and Experiments Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pulsatile Gaussian-Enveloped Tones (GET) Vocoders for Cochlear-Implant Simulation

Meng

Zhou

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…An adaptive staircase SRT in noise test was administered to further evaluate the performance of eVoice. This SRT measurement method was adopted from our previous studies (Meng et al, 2016(Meng et al, , 2019 with two minor changes: (1) the stimulus presentation time was reduced from three at most to two at most, and (2) the correctness judgment threshold was changed from 50% words in a sentence to 80% words. The first was done to reduce experiment time.…”

Section: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The SRTs for each condition with and without eVoice were tested. For each condition, two types of background noise were used: SSN and babble noise, which were generated using the method described in section "Speech Stimuli and Tasks" of Experiment 2 in Meng et al (2019). The SRT for each condition-background combination was tested twice using two different MHINT lists, and the results were averaged between the two lists as the final SRT.…”

Section: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A New Approach for Noise Suppression in Cochlear Implants: A Single-Channel Noise Reduction Algorithm1

Zhou

Wang²,

Zheng

et al. 2020

Front. Neurosci.

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The cochlea "translates" the in-air vibrational acoustic "language" into the spikes of neural "language" that are then transmitted to the brain for auditory understanding and/or perception. During this intracochlear "translation" process, high resolution in time-frequency-intensity domains guarantees the high quality of the input neural information for the brain, which is vital for our outstanding hearing abilities. However, cochlear implants (CIs) have coarse artificial coding and interfaces, and CI users experience more challenges in common acoustic environments than their normalhearing (NH) peers. Noise from sound sources that a listener has no interest in may be neglected by NH listeners, but they may distract a CI user. We discuss the CI noise-suppression techniques and introduce noise management for a new implant system. The monaural signal-to-noise ratio estimation-based noise suppression algorithm "eVoice," which is incorporated in the processors of Nurotron R Enduro TM , was evaluated in two speech perception experiments. The results show that speech intelligibility in stationary speech-shaped noise can be significantly improved with eVoice. Similar results have been observed in other CI devices with single-channel noise reduction techniques. Specifically, the mean speech reception threshold decrease in the present study was 2.2 dB. The Nurotron society already has more than 10,000 users, and eVoice is a start for noise management in the new system. Future steps on nonstationary-noise suppression, spatial-source separation, bilateral hearing, microphone configuration, and environment specification are warranted. The existing evidence, including our research, suggests that noise-suppression techniques should be applied in CI systems. The artificial hearing of CI listeners requires more advanced signal processing techniques to reduce brain effort and increase intelligibility in noisy settings.

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Channel-Vocoder-Centric Modelling of Cochlear Implants: Strengths and Limitations

Kong

Zhou

et al. 2022

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering

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Time-compression thresholds for Mandarin sentences in normal-hearing and cochlear implant listeners

Cited by 12 publications

References 30 publications

Pulsatile Gaussian-Enveloped Tones (GET) Vocoders for Cochlear-Implant Simulation

Pulsatile Gaussian-Enveloped Tones (GET) Vocoders for Cochlear-Implant Simulation

A New Approach for Noise Suppression in Cochlear Implants: A Single-Channel Noise Reduction Algorithm1

Channel-Vocoder-Centric Modelling of Cochlear Implants: Strengths and Limitations

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