The effects of binaural spectral resolution mismatch on Mandarin speech perception in simulated electric hearing

J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Aug;132(2):EL142-8. doi: 10.1121/1.4737595.

Abstract

This study assessed the effects of binaural spectral resolution mismatch on the intelligibility of Mandarin speech in noise using bilateral cochlear implant simulations. Noise-vocoded Mandarin speech, corrupted by speech-shaped noise at 0 and 5 dB signal-to-noise ratios, were presented unilaterally or bilaterally to normal-hearing listeners with mismatched spectral resolution between ears. Significant binaural benefits for Mandarin speech recognition were observed only with matched spectral resolution between ears. In addition, the performance of tone identification was more robust to noise than that of sentence recognition, suggesting factors other than tone identification might account more for the degraded sentence recognition in noise.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation
  • Adult
  • Analysis of Variance
  • Audiometry, Speech
  • Auditory Threshold
  • Cochlear Implantation / instrumentation
  • Cochlear Implants
  • Computer Simulation*
  • Correction of Hearing Impairment / psychology
  • Cues
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Models, Psychological*
  • Noise / adverse effects
  • Perceptual Masking
  • Persons With Hearing Impairments / psychology
  • Persons With Hearing Impairments / rehabilitation
  • Recognition, Psychology
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Speech Acoustics
  • Speech Intelligibility
  • Speech Perception*
  • Time Factors
  • Young Adult