engleski

The role of temporal and spectral information in gender identification and discrimination in children with cochlear implants

This project examined gender identification of adult human voices in a population of forty-one children with cochlear implants (CI), and a control population of 15 age-matched hearing peers. An identification experiment tested whether children with CI were able to identify the gender of speakers from 2-sec speech excerpts (natural speech segments with fundamental frequencies between 80 Hz and 220 Hz), and a discrimination experiment quantified the participants ability to discriminate between genders as a function of the average fundamental frequency difference between pairs of natural speech segments. All control subjects had perfect or near-perfect performance in both tasks. CI subjects fell into three groups depending on their performance. One group (n=18) performed above chance in both experiments, and another group (n=18) performed at chance in both experiments. A third group of CI participans (n=5) could discriminate the gender of voices even at small fundamental frequency differences, but were unable to identify gender correctly. The spectral and temporal information provided by the CI device of each participant in response to the specific stimuli used in the experiments were measured empirically, and the perceptual performance of all participants were analyzed according to this information and according to their hearing history (age of first deafness diagnosis, age of implantation, duration of CI use). The results of these analyses will be presented during the conference.

cochlear implant; voice gender; pitch; temporal cues; spectral cues

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