TY - JOUR
T1 - The perception of emotion and focus prosody with varying acoustic cues in cochlear implant simulations with varying filter slopes
AU - Van De Velde, Daan J.
AU - Schiller, Niels O.
AU - Van Heuven, Vincent J.
AU - Levelt, Claartje C.
AU - Van Ginkel, Joost
AU - Beers, Mieke
AU - Briaire, Jeroen J.
AU - Frijns, Johan H.M.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Acoustical Society of America.
PY - 2017/5/1
Y1 - 2017/5/1
N2 - This study aimed to find the optimal filter slope for cochlear implant simulations (vocoding) by testing the effect of a wide range of slopes on the discrimination of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody, with varying availability of F0 and duration cues. Forty normally hearing participants judged if (non-)vocoded sentences were pronounced with happy or sad emotion, or with adjectival or nominal focus. Sentences were recorded as natural stimuli and manipulated to contain only emotion- or focus-relevant segmental duration or F0 information or both, and then noise-vocoded with 5, 20, 80, 120, and 160 dB/octave filter slopes. Performance increased with steeper slopes, but only up to 120 dB/octave, with bigger effects for emotion than for focus perception. For emotion, results with both cues most closely resembled results with F0, while for focus results with both cues most closely resembled those with duration, showing emotion perception relies primarily on F0, and focus perception on duration. This suggests that filter slopes affect focus perception less than emotion perception because for emotion, F0 is both more informative and more affected. The performance increase until extreme filter slope values suggests that much performance improvement in prosody perception is still to be gained for CI users.
AB - This study aimed to find the optimal filter slope for cochlear implant simulations (vocoding) by testing the effect of a wide range of slopes on the discrimination of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody, with varying availability of F0 and duration cues. Forty normally hearing participants judged if (non-)vocoded sentences were pronounced with happy or sad emotion, or with adjectival or nominal focus. Sentences were recorded as natural stimuli and manipulated to contain only emotion- or focus-relevant segmental duration or F0 information or both, and then noise-vocoded with 5, 20, 80, 120, and 160 dB/octave filter slopes. Performance increased with steeper slopes, but only up to 120 dB/octave, with bigger effects for emotion than for focus perception. For emotion, results with both cues most closely resembled results with F0, while for focus results with both cues most closely resembled those with duration, showing emotion perception relies primarily on F0, and focus perception on duration. This suggests that filter slopes affect focus perception less than emotion perception because for emotion, F0 is both more informative and more affected. The performance increase until extreme filter slope values suggests that much performance improvement in prosody perception is still to be gained for CI users.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029903051&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1121/1.4982198
DO - 10.1121/1.4982198
M3 - Article
C2 - 28599540
AN - SCOPUS:85029903051
SN - 0001-4966
VL - 141
SP - 3349
EP - 3363
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
IS - 5
ER -