Recognition of interrupted sentences under conditions of spectral degradation

Abstract

Cochlear implant (CI) and normally hearing (NH) listeners’ recognition of periodically interrupted sentences was investigated. CI listeners’ scores declined drastically when the sentences were interrupted. The NH listeners showed a significant decline in performance with increasing spectral degradation using CI-simulated, noise-band-vocoded speech. It is inferred that the success of top-down processes necessary for the perceptual reconstruction of interrupted speech is limited by even mild degradations of the bottom-up information stream (16 and 24 band processing). A hypothesis that the natural voice-pitch variations in speech would help in the perceptual reconstruction of the sentences was not supported by experimental results.