Gradual adaptation to auditory frequency mismatch.

What is the best way to help humans adapt to a distorted sensory input? Interest in this question is more than academic. The answer may help facilitate auditory learning by people who became deaf after learning language and later received a cochlear implant (a neural prosthesis that restores hearing through direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve). There is evidence that some cochlear implants (which provide information that is spectrally degraded to begin with) stimulate neurons with higher characteristic frequency than the acoustic frequency of the original stimulus.

The effect of perimodiolar placement on speech perception and frequency discrimination by cochlear implant users.

Conclusion: Neither speech understanding nor frequency discrimination ability was better in Nucleus Contour users than in Nucleus 24 straight electrode users. Furthermore, perimodiolar electrode placement does not result in better frequency discrimination.

Objectives: We addressed three questions related to perimodiolar electrode placement.

Development of language and speech perception in congenitally, profoundly deaf children as a function of age at cochlear implantation.

Like any other surgery requiring anesthesia, cochlear implantation in the first few years of life carries potential risks, which makes it important to assess the potential benefits. This study introduces a new method to assess the effect of age at implantation on cochlear implant outcomes: developmental trajectory analysis (DTA). DTA compares curves representing change in an outcome measure over time (i.

Acoustic and electrical pattern analysis of consonant perceptual cues used by cochlear implant users.

It is hypothesized that for postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users, a significant source of their perceptual performance variability is attributable to differences in their ability to discriminate the basic perceptual cues that are important in speech recognition. Previous research on 'electric hearing' has identified consistent perceptual cues for vowel recognition. However, the results on consonant perception by CI users are less clear.