Perceptual contributions of vowels and consonant-vowel transitions in simulated electric-acoustic hearing

The present work assessed the perceptual impact of vowels and consonant-vowel transitions in simulated electric-acoustic hearing. Mandarin sentences were processed by two vocoder models simulating electric and electric-acoustic stimulation, followed by a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve target speech segments and replace the rest with noise, and finally presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. The results demonstrated a much larger perceptual advantage of vowels than consonants to sentence intelligibility, and showed the combined-stimulation advantage under segmental conditions containing vowels. Adding consonant-vowel transitions in combined electric-acoustic stimulation yielded sentence recognition performance equivalent to that observed with electric stimulation and full speech segments.