Coding of vowellike signals in cochlear implant listeners

Neural-population interactions resulting from excitation overlap in multi-channel cochlear implants (CI) may cause blurring of the "internal" auditory representation of complex sounds such as vowels. In experiment I, confusion matrices for eight German steady-state vowellike signals were obtained from seven CI listeners. Identification performance ranged between 42% and 74% correct. On the basis of an information transmission analysis across all vowels, pairs of most and least frequently confused vowels were selected for each subject. In experiment II, vowel masking patterns (VMPs) were obtained using the previously selected vowels as maskers. The VMPs were found to resemble the "electrical" vowel spectra to a large extent, indicating a relatively weak effect of neural-population interactions. Correlation between vowel identification data and VMP spectral similarity, measured by means of several spectral distance metrics, showed that the CI listeners identified the vowels based on differences in the between-peak spectral information as well as the location of spectral peaks. The effect of nonlinear amplitude mapping of acoustic into "electrical" vowels, as performed in the implant processors, was evaluated separately and compared to the effect of neural-population interactions. Amplitude mapping was found to cause more blurring than neural-population interactions. Subjects exhibiting strong blurring effects yielded lower overall vowel identification scores.