Recognition of Spanish consonants in 8-talker babble by children with cochlear implants, and by children and adults with normal hearing

摘要

This paper presents the results of closed-set recognition task for 80 Spanish consonant-vowel sounds in 8-talker babble. Three groups of subjects participated in the study: a group of children using cochlear implants (CIs; age range: 7-13), an age-matched group of children with normal hearing (NH), and a group of adults with NH. The speech-to-noise ratios at which the participants recognized 33% of the target consonants were +7.8 dB, -3dB, and -6dB, respectively. In order to clarify the qualitative differences between the groups, groups were matched for the percentage of recognized syllables. As compared with the two groups with NH, the children with CIs: (1) produced few "I do not know" responses; (2) frequently selected the voiced stops (i.e., /b, d, g/) and the most energetic consonants (i.e., /I, r, j, s, tf/); (3) showed no vowel context effects; and (4) had a robust voicing bias. As compared with the adults with NH, both groups of children showed a fronting bias in place of articulation errors. The factors underlying these error patterns are discussed. (C) 2018 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0