Head shadow, squelch, and summation effects with an energetic or informational masker in bilateral and bimodal CI users.

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the influence of noise (energetic) and speech (energetic plus informational) maskers on the head shadow (HS), squelch (SQ), and binaural summation (SU) effect in bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant (CI) users.

Method: Speech recognition was measured in the presence of either a competing talker or modulated speech-shaped noise in 10 bimodal and 10 bilateral adult CI users. HS, SQ, and SU effects were calculated.

Use of intonation contours for speech recognition in noise by cochlear implant recipients.

The corruption of intonation contours has detrimental effects on sentence-based speech recognition in normal-hearing listeners Binns and Culling [(2007). J. Acoust.

Bimodal hearing and speech perception with a competing talker.

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the influence of bimodal stimulation upon hearing ability for speech recognition in the presence of a single competing talker.

Method: Speech recognition was measured in 3 listening conditions: hearing aid (HA) alone, cochlear implant (CI) alone, and both devices together (CI + HA). To examine the use of low-frequency cues, the competing masker voice was manipulated with respect to fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies.

The perception of sentence stress in cochlear implant recipients.

Objectives: Sentence stress is a vital attribute of speech since it indicates the importance of specific words within an utterance. Basic acoustic correlates of stress are syllable duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F0). Objectives of the study were to determine cochlear implant (CI) users' perception of the acoustic correlates and to uncover which cues are used for stress identification.

The perception of prosody and speaker gender in normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant recipients.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of altering the fundamental frequency (F0) on perception of prosody and speaker gender in both normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant (CI) recipients. Tests with natural speech and defined modifications of the F0 were performed, and the resulting changes in perception were measured. Compared to the normal-hearing listeners, most of the CI users exhibited worse outcomes, especially for sentence stress.