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Hearing and Donuts (Brain and Bagels) Seminar
March 12, 2021 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Presenter: Brittany N. Jaekel, AuD, PhD; Auditory Perception and Modeling Lab; Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences (Goupell lab); University of Maryland, College Park
Topic: Phonemic restoration appears to be a challenge for most cochlear-implant listeners
Use of the perceptual illusion of “phonemic restoration” is thought to boost speech understanding in realistic, noisy listening environments. Previous work in the field reported that, under certain conditions, most cochlear-implant (CI) listeners could use phonemic restoration to repair noise-interrupted speech. We attempted to capitalize on this finding and investigated whether we could elicit larger and more consistent phonemic restoration benefits in CI listeners. Our methods included manipulating qualities of the “bottom-up” speech signal and providing increased opportunities to use “top-down” linguistic knowledge. Instead, we found that the majority of our participants failed to show any phonemic restoration effects, much less any increases in speech repair as a result of our manipulations. We conducted a replication study and also analyzed hearing history profiles of CI listeners in an attempt to better understand the role of speech repair in this population.
