Relationship between environmental sound imagery and environmental sound identification in cochlear implant listeners

Abstract

Identification of common environmental sounds (“car honking,” “baby crying,” “waves”) is a continuing challenge for many adult postlingual cochlear implant (CI) listeners. This study investigated whether environmental sound imagery, used to characterize the strength of underlying mental representations, relates to CI listeners' environmental sound identification. CI participants first read the names of 24 individual sounds and rated how familiar, pleasant, complex, and easy to imagine each sound was on a 5-point scale. Next, they heard and identified each sound. Rating responses were transformed based on how each sound's rating corresponded to its identification accuracy to obtain an imagery correspondence index (ICI). A higher ICI indicates a closer agreement between a sound's rating and its identification accuracy. Across participants results indicated moderate-to-high correlations between identification accuracy and ICI scores only for familiarity and ease of imagining but not complexity and pleasantness. A similar correlation pattern with raw ratings was observed across sounds but not across participants. These results suggest that aspects of environmental sound imagery can be predictive of auditory perception of real-world sounds in CI listeners and should be considered in future diagnostic and rehabilitation applications.