Perception of Japanese Prosodical Phonemes through use of a Bone-conducted Ultrasonic Hearing-aid

Human listeners can perceive speech signals in a voice modulated ultrasonic carrier from a bone-conduction stimulator, even if the listeners are patients with sensorineural hearing loss. Considering this fact, we have been developing a boneconducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of the BCUHA regarding perception of Japanese prosodic phonemes, specifically, perception of singleton/geminate consonants, short/long vowels and pitch accent. For this purpose, a series of phoneme discrimination experiments was conducted. The results of the experiments showed that no significant difference between airconduction and BCUHA conditions was observed. These results indicate that the BCUHA can transmit short/long vowels, single/geminate consonants and pitch accent information as well as segmental information.