Title: "Speech Understanding in Child and Adult Simulated Cochlear-Implant Users with Shallow Insertion Depths"
Speaker: Sara Dougherty, HESP Honors Program
Date: Wednesday, April 9; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
Throughout the past decade, there has been a drastic increase in the number of profoundly deaf individuals who receive a cochlear implant. Numerous factors contribute to variability between cochlear-implant users’ outcomes, including age of implantation and insertion depth of the implant’s electrode array. Frequency-to-place mismatch often occurs in cochlear implant users when spectral information is presented to the wrong place of the electrode array, due to the fact that the electrode array cannot be surgically implanted fully into the apical turn of the cochlea. The purpose of this study was to compare how adults and children adapt to eight-channel sine-vocoded speech with 0, 3, and 6 mm of frequency-to-place mismatch. Twenty adults (>18 yrs) and ten children (8-10 yrs) were trained with visual and audio feedback on vocoded speech understanding over a four-hour period. On average, children performed worse than adults. Over the first five testing/training blocks, children improved at a slower rate than adults. High variability existed within both groups, with the greatest amount of variability in the 6-mm sine-vocoded speech condition. These results suggest that adults have developed neural and/or cognitive mechanisms that can more effectively adapt to degraded and frequency-shifted speech.
