Spectral contrast effects, the perceptual magnification of spectral differences between sounds, have been widely shown to influence speech categorization. However, whether talker information alters spectral contrast effects was recently debated [Laing, Liu, Lotto, and Holt, Front. Psychol. 3, 1-9 (2012)]. Here, contributions of reliable spectral properties, between-talker and within-talker vari...

The minimum spectral contrast needed for vowel identification by normal-hearing and cochlear implant listeners was determined in this study. In experiment 1, a spectral modification algorithm was used that manipulated the channel amplitudes extracted from a 6-channel continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) processor to have a 1-10 dB spectral contrast. The spectrally modified amplitudes of eight ...