Abstract
Sid Bacon's contributions to auditory science span a wide range of topics but two areas were constant themes throughout his career: temporal modulation perception, and peripheral processing and frequency selectivity. In this study, speech understanding in noise was measured, with a focus on the role of inherent temporal fluctuations in noise maskers. Tonal maskers, presented to cochlear-implant users, were placed at the center frequencies of each frequency channel of the implant, thereby producing the same masker energy as a noise masker in each frequency channel, but without the inherent fluctuations. In contrast to the results from normal-hearing subjects listening through a tone-excited envelope vocoder, cochlear-implant users gained no benefit from eliminating the inherent fluctuations from the maskers. Further experiments suggested that the poor spectral resolution of cochlear implants resulted in a smoothing of the temporal envelope of the noise maskers. The results indicate an important, and potentially overlooked, effect of spectral resolution on the temporal representations of speech and noise in cochlear implants. The results also suggest a new interpretation for why cochlear-implant users, and perhaps hearing-impaired listeners, generally show reduced masking release when additional temporal modulations are imposed on noise maskers. [Work supported by NIH grant R01DC012262.]
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