OBJECTIVES Cochlear implants are a standard therapy for deafness, yet the ability of implanted patients to understand speech varies widely. To better understand this variability in outcomes, the authors used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to image activity within regions of the auditory cortex and compare the results to behavioral measures of speech perception. DESIGN The authors studi...

OBJECTIVE Many reports have established that hearing-impaired children using the Nucleus 22-channel cochlear implant may show both significant benefits to lipreading and significant scores on open-set words and sentences using electrical stimulation only. These findings have raised questions about whether severely or severely-to-profoundly deaf children should be candidates for cochlear implant...

OBJECTIVE To examine the direct and indirect effects of demographical factors on speech perception and vocabulary outcomes of Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). METHODS 115 participants implanted before the age of 5 and who had used CI before 1 to 3 years were evaluated using a battery of speech perception and vocabulary tests. Structural equation modeling was used to te...

The extent to which human speech perception evolved by taking advantage of predispositions and pre-existing features of vertebrate auditory and cognitive systems remains a central question in the evolution of speech. This paper reviews asymmetries in vowel perception, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization in non-human animals - topics that have not been thoroughly discussed in re...

the role of orthography in difficult speech perception tasks has already been proved (dehaene & cohen, 2011). since the processing of heterographic homophones is believed to be more difficult than other words (hino & colleagues, 2013), the present study aimed at identifying the role of orthography and word forms in perception of such words during top-down processes, such as speech perception. a...

The present study is concerned with developing a speech synthesis subcomponent for perception testing in the context of evaluating cochlear implants in children. We provide a detailed requirements analysis, and develop a strategy for maximally high quality speech synthesis using Close Copy Speech synthesis techniques with a diphone based speech synthesiser, MBROLA. The close copy concept used i...

Demonstration of successful outcomes from use of a sensory device by individuals with hearing loss depends to a large extent on quantifiable improvements in auditory performance. Quantifiable improvements are typically characterized by speech perception outcomes, which involve speech awareness/detection, reception, discrimination, identification or recognition of speechtype materials (e.g., pho...

A speech corpus is available in Romanian to use as the common material in speech perception and automatic speech recognition. It consists of high-quality audio of 400 sentences spoken by each of 12 speakers. Utterances are simple, syntactically identical phrases such as “muta bronz cu p 2 agale.” Preliminary intelligibility tests using the audio signals suggest that the collected speech is easi...