Effect of electric-acoustic cochlear implant stimulation and coding strategies on spatial cues of speech signals in reverberant room

Abstract

The comparison of spatial cues changes in different setups and coding strategies used in cochlear implants (CI) is investigated. In this experiment, we implement three voice coder setups, such as bilateral CI, bimodal CI, and electro-acoustic stimulation (EAS). Two well-known coding strategies are used, which are continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) and spectral peak (SPEAK). Speech signals are convoluted with appropriate binaural room impulse response (BRIR), creating reverberant spatial stimuli. Five different reverberant conditions (including anechoic) were applied to the stimuli. Interaural level and time differences (ILD and ITD) are evaluated objectively and subjectively, and their relationship with the intelligibility of speech is observed. Prior objective evaluation with CIS reveals that clarity (C50) becomes a more important factor in spatial cue change than reverberation time. Vocoded conditions (bilateral CI) show an increment in ILD value (compression has not been implemented yet on the vocoder processing), when the value of ITD gets more different (decreased) from the middle point. Reverberation degrades the intelligibility rate at various rates depending on the C50 value, both in unvocoded and vocoded conditions. In the vocoded condition, decrement on spatial cues was also followed by the decreement on the intelligibility of spatial stimuli.