Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2022 Sep;152(3):1300. doi: 10.1121/10.0013890.
Perception of word stress is an important aspect of recognizing speech, guiding the listener toward candidate words based on the perceived stress pattern. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing is likely to disrupt some of the available cues for word stress, particularly vowel quality and pitch contour changes. In this study, we used a cue weighting paradigm to investigate differences in stress cue weighting patterns between participants listening with CIs and those with normal hearing (NH). We found that participants with CIs gave less weight to frequency-based pitch and vowel quality cues than NH listeners but compensated by upweighting vowel duration and intensity cues. Nonetheless, CI listeners' stress judgments were also significantly influenced by vowel quality and pitch, and they modulated their usage of these cues depending on the specific word pair in a manner similar to NH participants. In a series of separate online experiments with NH listeners, we simulated aspects of bimodal hearing by combining low-pass filtered speech with a vocoded signal. In these conditions, participants upweighted pitch and vowel quality cues relative to a fully vocoded control condition, suggesting that bimodal listening holds promise for restoring the stress cue weighting patterns exhibited by listeners with NH.
对词重音的感知是识别语音的一个重要方面，它可以根据感知到的重音模式引导听众选择候选词。人工耳蜗（CI）信号处理可能会破坏一些可用的词重音线索，特别是元音质量和音高轮廓的变化。在这项研究中，我们使用线索加权范式来研究使用 CI 聆听的参与者和具有正常听力（NH）的参与者之间的重音线索加权模式的差异。我们发现，与 NH 听众相比，CI 使用者对基于频率的音高和元音质量线索的重视程度较低，但通过强调元音时长和强度线索进行了补偿。然而，CI 使用者的重音判断也受到元音质量和音高的显著影响，他们会根据特定的词对来调整这些线索的使用，这与 NH 参与者相似。在一系列针对 NH 听众的独立在线实验中，我们通过将低通滤波的语音与编码信号相结合来模拟双模态听力的各个方面。在这些条件下，参与者相对于完全编码控制条件加重了音高和元音质量线索的权重，这表明双模态听力有望恢复 NH 听众表现出的重音线索加权模式。
