Speech recognition of spectrums with ‘holes’ by children

Abstract

The identification of speech having holes in various bands in the spectrum was assessed in 30 normal hearing children. The speech material that was developed simulated perception through a twenty–two channel cochlear implant using noise band simulation technique. The ‘holes’ in the spectrum were created by filtering specific frequency bands which corresponded to the frequency bands of adjacent electrodes in a Nucleus cochlear implant. Responses were scored in terms of words and phonemes as well as consonants and vowels. It was found that there were less consonant errors than vowel errors for both word scoring and phoneme scoring. This error pattern was more with larger „hole‟ size. It was also noticed that younger children in this study showed significantly poorer performance than older children.