ding25@interspeech_2025@ISCA

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#1 Linguistic Masking and Its Release in Simulated Electric-acoustic Hearing [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yuting Ding, Xuefei Wang, Fei Chen

Combined electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS) with a cochlear implant (CI) and a hearing aid can significantly improve CI user’s speech-in-noise performance, which is noted as combined stimulation advantage. The present study aimed to investigate this advantage in the context of linguistic masking, i.e., when the target speech and masker were from the same or different languages, and how combined stimulation and different linguistic masker affected linguistic release from masking (LRM). Mandarin sentences were mixed with 2-talker babble maskers spoken in Mandarin, Cantonese or English, processed by noise vocoder models simulating CI or EAS hearing, and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. Experimental results showed the combined stimulation advantage under linguistic masking with all three languages. The EAS condition yielded significant difference between the scores of two LRMs (i.e., English vs. Mandarin, and Cantonese vs. Mandarin). Under linguistic masking with Cantonese, there was significant difference between the scores of CI- and EAS-based LRMs. The findings of the present work provided new insights on the benefits for CI users using combined electric-acoustic stimulation.

Subject: INTERSPEECH.2025 - Others