Effect of carrier bandwidth on understanding mandarin sentences in simulated electric-acoustic hearing

Wang，Feng1; Chen，Jing2,3; Chen，Fei1

10.21437/Interspeech.2021-24

2021

2308-457X

1990-9772

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH

1

446-450

For patients suffering with high-frequency hearing loss and preserving low-frequency hearing, combined electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS) may significantly improve their speech perception compared with cochlear implants (CIs). In combined EAS, a hearing aid provides low-frequency information via acoustic (A) stimulation and a CI evokes highfrequency sound sensation via electrical (E) stimulation. The present work investigated the EAS advantage when only a small number (i.e., 1 or 2) of channels were provided for electrical stimulation in a CI, and the effect of carrier bandwidth on understanding Mandarin sentences in a simulation of combined EAS experiment. The A-portion was extracted via low-pass filtering processing and the E-portion was generated with a vocoder model preserving multi-channel temporal envelope waveforms, whereas a noise-vocoder and a tone-vocoder were used to simulate the effect of carrier bandwidth. The synthesized stimuli were presented to normalhearing listeners to recognize. Experimental results showed that while low-pass filtered Mandarin speech was not very intelligible, adding one or two E channels could significantly improve the intelligibility score to above 86.0%. Under the condition with one E channel, using a large carrier bandwidth in noise-vocoder processing provided a better intelligibility performance than using a narrow carrier bandwidth in tonevocoder processing.

Cochlear implants Combined electric-acoustic stimulation Combined stimulation advantage

第一 ; 通讯

英语

EI

20214711191801

Acoustic noise ; Audition ; Bandwidth ; Electric losses ; Low pass filters ; Noise abatement ; Speech communication ; Speech intelligibility ; Vocoders

Ergonomics and Human Factors Engineering:461.4 ; Prosthetics:462.4 ; Electric Filters:703.2 ; Information Theory and Signal Processing:716.1 ; Acoustic Noise:751.4 ; Speech:751.5 ; Sound Recording:752.2 ; Acoustical Instruments:941.1

2-s2.0-85119286400

Scopus

1.Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Southern University of Science and Technology,Shenzhen,China
2.Speech and Hearing Research Center,And Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education),Peking University,Beijing,China
3.Peng Cheng Laboratory,Shenzhen,China

Wang，Feng,Chen，Jing,Chen，Fei. Effect of carrier bandwidth on understanding mandarin sentences in simulated electric-acoustic hearing[C],2021:446-450.