Lexical difficulty affects vowel articulation in adult cochlear implant users

Talkers with normal hearing hyperarticulate vowels in lexically hard words (i.e., a low word frequency and high neighborhood density) relative to easy words. This difference articulation has been attributed normal-hearing talkers making listener-oriented articulatory adjustments facilitate intelligibility of their own speech. The extent which adult cochlear implant users exhibit these tendencies vowel production is unclear, part due the spectrally degraded signal delivered by implant. exposure could make less sensitive acoustic-phonetic differences between words, lead them not hyperarticulating In this study, read series isolated monosyllabic varying lexical difficulty. These hyperarticulated those consistent account speech patterns previous findings talkers. finding suggests that may be able overcome input