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Seminars in Hearing Research (11/30/23) - Cole Trent

Seminars in Hearing Research (11/30/23) - Cole Trent

Author: M. Heinz
Event Date: November 30, 2023
Hosted By: Maureen Shader
Time: 1200-100
Location: Zoom
Contact Name: Shader, Maureen J
Contact Email: mshader@purdue.edu
Open To: All
Priority: No
School or Program: Non-Engineering
College Calendar: Show
Cole Trent, (PhD Student, SLHS) will present "Discrimination of intact vs elliptical sentences in CI-simulated speech" at our next Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP) on November 30th at 12-100 in NLSN 1215

Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)


Date: Thursday, November 30th, 2023
Time: 12pm - 1:00pm
Location: NLSN 1215


Title: Discrimination of intact vs elliptical sentences in CI-simulated speech.

Speaker: Cole Trent PhD Student, SLHS

Abstract: Cochlear implant (CI) speech-recognition outcomes are influenced by various combinations of bottom-up and top-down factors. As such, there is substantial individual variability in CI outcomes. The purpose of this project is to assess elliptical speech as a tool for evaluating bottom-up perceptual acuity in CI users. Noise-vocoded sentence stimuli were presented to 10 normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Stimuli consisted of IEEE sentences that either maintained correct consonant place-of-articulation cues (Intact Speech) or contained consonant “ellipses” that ambiguated spectral cues to consonant place (Elliptical Speech). The “ellipses” replaced each key-word consonant with a new consonant maintaining the same manner and voicing of the original, but with an altered place feature. A concurrent neuroimaging measurement was conducted to estimate cortical activity in bilateral auditory cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex via functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). This project tested our hypotheses that: 1) NH participants will successfully detect ellipses in more favorable listening conditions but will be unable to detect ellipses under more degraded listening conditions, and 2) listeners will demonstrate differences in cortical activity in response to Intact vs Elliptical speech depending on the severity of the signal degradation. Preliminary results demonstrate that the detection of ellipses in speech is impacted by the spectral resolution of the signal, and this result is also reflected in listeners’ cortical activity. These results have important implications for CI users whereby elliptical speech is a potential tool for isolating the quality of the bottom-up input from top-down processing of speech.



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