Speech Recognition for Cochlear Implant Users in the Noisy Environment: The Role of Envelope and Fine Structure

Abstract

Sound signal can be decomposed to a slowly varying envelope cue and a rapidly varying fine structure cue. These cues can help people to sound perception, sound lateralization, speech recognition in noise, and so on. Cochlear implant can help people with hearing loss to hear the sound. However, there are still many restrictions with cochlear implant user and a gap between normal hearing and cochlear implant user. This study investigated the contribution of envelope and fine structure cues with different SNR and simulated cochlear implant in Taiwanese mandarin speech recognition in noise. Ten normal hearing subjects participated in this experiment. Our result shows sentence recognition in noise almost depends on the envelope cues, but the fine structure cues still have limited contributions.