Abstract
Electrical stimulation of the auditory pathway produces different patterns of neural activity than those acoustically elicited. Traditional signal-processing strategies for cochlear implant usually do not utilize phase information contained in sound waves. Here, to evaluate potential advantages of introducing phase information to cochlear implant devices, a new signal processing method, so called simulated phase-locking stimulation (SPLS), was developed. To convey phase information of sound signals to the auditory nerve, electrical stimulation pulses were delivered at the zero-crossing time of sine waves of frequency bands after band-pass filtering and envelope extraction. The advantages of the SPLS method over the method of Continuous Interleaved Sampling (CIS+) were demonstrated by both objective evaluations, such as the spectro-temporal modulation index (STMI), and subjective evaluations, such as recognition of processed Chinese speech by normal hearing listeners under either noise (energetic) masking or speech (informational) masking conditions. The results suggest that the SPLS method is able to improve the function of cochlear devices by extracting and transferring fine-structure signals, which are important for cochlear-implant listeners to perceive tonal speech and music.
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