Abstract
This study investigates whether a presumed difference in the perceptibility of cues to lexical stress in spectro-temporally degraded simulated cochlear implant (CI) speech affects how listeners weight these cues during a lexical stress identification task, specifically in their non-native language. Previous research suggests that in English, listeners predominantly rely on a reduction in vowel quality as a cue to lexical stress. In Dutch, changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) contour seem to have a greater functional weight than the vowel quality contrast. Generally, non-native listeners use the cue-weighting strategies from their native language in the non-native language. Moreover, few studies have suggested that these cues to lexical stress are differently perceptible in spectro-temporally degraded electric hearing, as CI users appear to make more effective use of changes in vowel quality than of changes in the F0 contour. The present study examined whether Dutch non-native listeners, when listening to English, reweighted these cues to lexical stress in spectro-temporally degraded CI-simulated speech by creating a condition in which the perceptibility of the F0 contour was diminished relative to the vowel quality contrast.
Type
Publication
Language and Speech, 67(4), 1075-1092
This research investigates how Dutch listeners identify lexical stress in English when the speech is degraded to simulate cochlear implant processing. The study examines whether listeners adjust their cue-weighting strategies when certain acoustic cues (like fundamental frequency) are less perceptible due to signal degradation.
Our findings have important implications for understanding speech perception in cochlear implant users, particularly for non-native language processing. The results contribute to our knowledge of how listeners adapt to challenging listening conditions by reweighting available acoustic cues.
The study is part of a broader research program examining prosody perception in cochlear implant users and simulations, with applications for improving cochlear implant technology and rehabilitation strategies for implant recipients.
