Perception of prosodic cues to correct mistakes, in listeners with normal hearing and with cochlear implants

Abstract

Prosody is used to mark important information in speech yet is not an integral part of speech recognition testing among people with hearing difficulty. While a listener may correctly perceive words spoken, they may not perceive meaningful emphasis on a certain word, which could be critically important in a variety of everyday situations. This study introduces a new paradigm for assessing perception of prosodic cues in listeners with normal hearing and with cochlear implants, who have notorious difficulty perceiving pitch. Stimuli consisted of spoken sentences where one word (in various sentence positions) was emphasized in a manner that indicated that a prior statement was incorrect in a specific way. Participants used a visual analog scale to mark the timing and degree of emphasis aligned with the target words. Here, the perceptual data are linked with acoustic measures of voice pitch contour, intensity, duration, and vocal quality to characterize how contrastive stress cues are recovered by listeners with and without hearing impairment.