Discrimination of synthetic vowels by using tactile vocoder and a comparison to that of an eight-channel cochlear...

A vowel discrimination test using a tactual vocoder was administered and the results were compared to that of an eight-channel cochlear implant. Both the tactile vocoder and the cochlear implant divided the speech signals into 16 frequency components using band-pass filters and lateral inhibition circuits. In the tactile vocoder, these 16 components were converted into a vibration with 200 Hz frequency and applied to a 3 x 16 element vibrator array using bimorph piezoelectric elements. The vibratory patterns were sensed on the fingertip. In the cochlear implant, the 16 components were reduced to eight current stimulation signals, consisting of biphasic pulses with 200 Hz frequency, which were applied to an eight-channel electrode array implanted in the scala tympani. The electrode array passed through the round window into the scala tympani to a depth of 23 mm. These psychophysical experiments investigate the ability of human subjects to discriminate synthetic vowels as a function of the number of channels employed. The results suggested that an eight-channel and a 16-channel tactile vocoder provided essentially the same discrimination scores. However, the ability to discriminate synthetic vowels decreased rapidly when less than eight channels were employed. The ability of an eight-channel tactile vocoder is expected to be better than that of the eight-channel cochlear implant because it is supposed that vowel discrimination is degraded by a phenomenon known as "current spreading" in the case of cochlear stimulation. However, the comparison between the two devices was not done on the cochlear implant subject.