Perceptual Discrimination of Speaking Style Under Cochlear Implant Simulation.
Terrin N Tamati, Esther Janse, Deniz Başkent
PMID 29742545WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing Dutch listeners could tell careful read, retold story and casual conversation speech apart without cochlear implant simulation.
With simulated implant hearing, style discrimination was less reliable, and word recognition fell as the simulation became more degraded.
Key findings
01Without simulation, listeners rated careful read speech as more careful than retold story speech and casual conversation speech, and retold story speech as more careful than casual conversation speech.
02Under CI-12 simulation, listeners did not distinguish the speaking styles; under CI-4 simulation, careful read and retold story were rated more careful than casual conversation.
03Mean word recognition accuracy was 94.8% with no simulation, 88.6% with CI-12, and 61.5% with CI-4.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The listeners were normal-hearing Dutch adults, not cochlear implant users, so their performance under simulation may not match implant users. The CI simulations may not fully capture real implant processing. The study did not correct for multiple comparisons in the post hoc tests. Speaking rate varied across talkers and was not a reliable cue to style in these materials. The materials had few pauses and limited conversational markers, so some style cues were weak. The intelligibility task included only a few utterances per talker and style, and lexical and semantic content varied across styles.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that cochlear implant users cannot discriminate speaking styles. This study tested normal-hearing listeners under simulated cochlear implant processing, not actual implant users, and some style differences were still detected under simulation.