Abstract
Individuals with residual hearing restricted to low frequencies are candidates for electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS). When low-frequency acoustic information is added to either real or simulated high-frequency electric stimulation, speech recognition often improves dramatically. This may reflect the availability of fundamental frequency (f0) information in the acoustic region. We tested this directly. In particular, we examined the relative contributions of f0 and the amplitude envelope of speech by replacing the low-frequency speech with a tone that was modulated either in frequency to track the f0 of the speech, in amplitude with the extracted envelope of the low-frequency speech, or both. A female talker was combined with various backgrounds and processed with a four-channel vocoder to simulate electric hearing. Across all backgrounds, intelligibility improved significantly when a tone tracking f0 was added to vocoder stimulation and further still when both f0 and amplitude envelope cues were applied. These results confirm the importance of f0 information (at least under simulated EAS) and indicate that significant information can be provided by a tone that tracks f0 or f0 and amplitude envelope cues. [Work supported in part by NIH.]
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