• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.71-78
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• 2020

Background and Objectives: Currently limited information is available on speech stimuli processing at the subcortical level in the recipients of cochlear implant (CI). Speech processing in the brainstem level is measured using speech-auditory brainstem response (S-ABR). The purpose of the present study was to measure the S-ABR components in the sound-field presentation in CI recipients, and compare with normal hearing (NH) children. Subjects and Methods: In this descriptive-analytical study, participants were divided in two groups: patients with CIs; and NH group. The CI group consisted of 20 prelingual hearing impairment children (mean age=8.90±0.79 years), with ipsilateral CIs (right side). The control group consisted of 20 healthy NH children, with comparable age and sex distribution. The S-ABR was evoked by the 40-ms synthesized /da/ syllable stimulus that was indicated in the sound-field presentation. Results: Sound-field S-ABR measured in the CI recipients indicated statistically significant delayed latencies, than in the NH group. In addition, these results demonstrated that the frequency following response peak amplitude was significantly higher in CI recipients, than in the NH counterparts (p<0.05). Finally, the neural phase locking were significantly lower in CI recipients (p<0.05). Conclusions: The findings of sound-field S-ABR demonstrated that CI recipients have neural encoding deficits in temporal and spectral domains at the brainstem level; therefore, the sound-field S-ABR can be considered an efficient clinical procedure to assess the speech process in CI recipients.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.87-98
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• 2008

This study compares the pitch production of children using cochlear implants (CI) with that of children with normal hearing. Twenty subjects from six to eight years old participated in the study. Three kinds of sentences were read and analyzed using Visi-Pitch $\blacktriangleright$(KAY Elemetrics, Model 3300). There were no considerable differences between the two groups regarding pitch, mean fundamental frequency (F0) and pitch range. In the cases of the slope value of F0 and duration, however, there were significant differences. Thus, it is concluded that duration and pitch control can be crucial factors in determining the intonation treatment of the children with cochlear implants.

• MALSORI
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• no.64
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• pp.1-14
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to examine the acoustic perception different by formants change for profoundly hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. The subjects were 10 children after 15 months of experience with the implant and mean of their chronological age was 8.4 years and Standard deviation was 2.9 years. The ability of auditory perception was assessed using acoustic-synthetic vowels. The acoustic-synthetic vowel was combined with F1, F2, and F3 into a vowel and produced 42 synthetic sound, using Speech GUI(Graphic User Interface) program. The data was deal with clustering analysis and on-line analytical processing for perception ability of acoustic synthetic vowel. The results showed that auditory perception scores of acoustic-synthetic vowels for cochlear implanted children were increased in F2 synthetic vowels compaire to those of F1. And it was found that they perceived the differences of vowels in terms of distance rates between F1 and F2 in specific vowel.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38C no.12
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• pp.1150-1158
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• 2013

Artificial cochlear implant system is known as the most efficient and widespread device to patients who have cochlear disorder. However, current commercialized artificial cochleas have inconveniences because of large volume size and high power consumption, requiring further research on improvements in terms of the size, power, and performance. In this paper, we will introduce our fully implantable artificial cochlear implant system, where small-size sensors and actuators are wirelessly connected, focusing on communication system design and its performance simulation.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.417-426
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• 2010

We present a speech processing strategy incorporating instantaneous frequency (IF) encoding for the enhancement of melody recognition performance of cochlear implants. For the IF extraction from incoming sound, we propose the use of a Teager energy operator (TEO), which is advantageous for its lower computational load. From time-frequency analysis, we verified that the TEO-based method provides proper IF encoding of input sound, which is crucial for melody recognition. Similar benefit could be obtained also from the use of a Hilbert transform (HT), but much higher computational cost was required. The melody recognition performance of the proposed speech processing strategy was compared with those of a conventional strategy using envelope extraction, and the HT-based IF encoding. Hearing tests on normal subjects were performed using acoustic simulation and a musical contour identification task. Insignificant difference in melody recognition performance was observed between the TEO-based and HT-based IF encodings, and both were superior to the conventional strategy. However, the TEO-based strategy was advantageous considering that it was approximately 35% faster than the HT-based strategy.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.694-702
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• 2007

The adaptation effect originating from the chemical synapse between auditory nerve and inner hair cell gives advantage in accurate representation of temporal cues of incoming speech such as speech onset. Thus it is expected that the modification of conventional speech processing strategies of cochlear implant(CI) by incorporating the adaptation effect will result in considerable improvement of speech perception performance such as consonant perception score. Our purpose in this paper was to evaluate our new CI speech processing strategy incorporating the adaptation effect by the observation of auditory nerve responses. By classifying the presence or absence of speech from the auditory nerve responses, i. e. spike trains, we could quantitatively compare speech onset detection performances of conventional and improved strategies. We could verify the effectiveness of the adaptation effect in improving the speech onset representation characteristics.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.67-78
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• 2016

This study examined the affective prosodic characteristics observed from the children with cochlear implant (CI, hereafter) and normal hearing (NH, hereafter) along with listener's perception on them. Speech samples were acquired from 15 normal and 15 CI children. 8 SLPs(Speech Language Pathologists) perceptually evaluated affective types using Praat's ExperimentMFC. When it comes to the acoustic results, there were statistically meaningful differences between 2 groups in affective types [joy (discriminated by intensity deviation), anger (by intensity-related variables dominantly and duration-related variables partly), and sadness (by all aspects of prosodic variables)]. CI's data are much more louder when expressing joy, louder and slower when expressing anger, and higher, louder, and slower when it comes to sadness than those of NH. The listeners showed much higher correlation when evaluating normal children than CI group(p<.001). Chi-square results revealed that listeners did not show coherence at CI's utterance, but did at those of NH's (CI(p<.01), normal(p=.48)). When CI utterances were discriminated into 3 emotional types by DA(Discriminant Analysis) using 8 acoustic variables, speed related variables such as articulation rate took primary role.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.117-127
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• 2012

This research reports the prosodic characteristics (including articulation speech rate, pause characteristics, duration) of children with cochlear implants with reference to those of children with normal hearing. Subjects are 8-to 10-year-old children, balancing each number of gender as 24. Dialogue speech data are comprised of four types of sentence patterns. Results show that 1) there's a statistically meaningful difference on articulation speech rate between the two groups. 2) On pauses, they are not observed in exclamatory and declarative sentences in normal children. While imperative sentences show no statistical difference on the number of pauses between the two groups, interrogative sentences do. 3) Declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences reveal statistical difference between the two groups in terms of the sentence's final two-syllable word duration, showing no difference on imperative sentences. 4) When it comes to the RFP (duration ratio of sentence final syllable to penultimate syllable), we no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups in all types of sentences exists. 5) Lastly, RWS (the ratio of sentence final two syllable word duration to that of whole sentence duration) shows statistical difference between two groups in imperative sentences, but not in all the rest types.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.197-202
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• 2005

The cochlear implantation(CI) as an useful tool for aural rehabilitation in bilateral severe to profound hearing impairment. However, CI prefer to usually one ear in spite of bilateral hearing impaired. because of the various characteristics of hearing loss, the hearing conservation for the future possibility, and socioeconomic condition of hearing impaired person and their families. The unilateral CI has limitations such as a directional loss, a difficult speech understanding in noise and a neural plasticity. These limitations will be overcome by hearing aid(HA) which is familiar with hearing impairer. but HA fitting for bimodal-binaural hearing are difficult because the difference output characteristic of HA and CI. This study will be confirm realities of use of HA in unilateral cochlear implantee. For this goal, 25(m:f=10:15) child participated who are used to HA for 1 to 17 months. We had telephone interviews with their mother about use of HA, change of auditory performance and own voice. As the results, hearing threshold levels of unimplanted ear, the use of a appropriate HA, implanted and aided hearing threshold level(HTL) are must be considered for successful biomodal-binaural hearing. Especially, implanted and aided HTL should be very useful parameter for a prediction of HA effect and a criterion of selection for bilateral cochlear implantation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.274-277
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is 1) to describe the phoneme inventories of cochlear implant(CI) children and 2) to describe their utterances using narrow phonetic transcription method. All the subjects had more than 2 year-experience with CI and showed more than 87% open-set sentence perception abilities. Average consonant accuracy was 81.36% and it was improved up to 87.41% when distortion errors were not counted. They showed different error patterns from hearing aid users. The prominent error pattern was weakening of consonants.