Evaluation and analysis of whispered speech for cochlear implant users: Gender identification and intelligibility

This study investigates the degree to which whispered speech impacts speech perception and gender identification in cochlear implant (CI) users. Listening experiments with six CI subjects under neutral and whispered speech conditions using sentences from the UT-Vocal Effort II corpus (recordings from male and female speakers) were conducted. Results indicated a significant effect of whispering on gender identification and speech intelligibility scores. In addition, no significant effect of talker gender on the speech/gender identification scores was observed. Results also suggested that exposure to longer speech stimuli, and consequently more temporal cues, would not improve gender identification performance in CI subjects.