Recognition of Accented Speech by Cochlear-Implant Listeners: Benefit of Audiovisual Cues.
Emily Waddington, Brittany N Jaekel, Anna R Tinnemore and 2 others
PMID 32069269WHAT IT FOUND
Cochlear-implant users and hearing listeners listening to simulated implant speech improved equally when seeing the speaker's mouth.
Visual cues helped both unaccented and accented speech, but the gain was smaller for accented speech once each listener's auditory-only score was considered.
Key findings
01Seeing the speaker's mouth improved sentence understanding for both cochlear-implant listeners and hearing listeners with simulated implant speech, and the two groups did not differ.
02Spanish-accented sentences were understood less well than unaccented sentences.
03After each listener's auditory-only score was considered, the audiovisual gain was larger for unaccented speech than for accented speech.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 15 cochlear-implant listeners and 15 hearing listeners were tested. Only one unaccented speaker and one accented speaker were used, so the result may reflect those speakers. The unaccented audiovisual condition was near ceiling, which may have hidden differences between groups and accents. Visual-only scores were near floor and were excluded from the main analysis. Hearing listeners had limited vocoder training, and the vocoder could not exceed 32 channels. Some hearing listeners had elevated high-frequency thresholds, so the hearing group was not completely normal-hearing.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that cochlear-implant users get more audiovisual benefit than hearing listeners. The groups were age and performance matched, and the study found no difference between them and no difference in how accent affected the two groups.