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Do cochlear-implanted children benefit from voice cue differences for understanding speech in speech masker?

Differences in voice cues of mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL) between a target and masker speech can help a listener to segregate the two, and enhance speech intelligibility. Postlingually deafened and implanted adult CI users have difficulties in perceiving F0 and VTL, and this possibly contributes to challenges in understanding speech in presence of a speech masker. Previous research showed that speech-on-speech understanding is not yet adult-like in normal-hearing (NH) children of school age, as this skill seems to develop over many years. Yet, like NH adults, NH children do seem to benefit from the voice cue differences in some situations. In the case of CI children, a number of factors could influence intelligibility of speech with speech maskers. Prelingually deafened and implanted CI children develop auditory skills primarily based on spectrotemporally degraded speech input, which could lead to different developmental patterns compared to NH children. On the other hand, the CI children would benefit from the optimal brain plasticity period for learning, which could lead to different perceptual patterns compared to CI adults. In this talk, I will present data from multiple projects with children and adults at our lab to investigate these potential expectations.