Conference
Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses 2023 Poster: Lake Tahoe, California
The UMN's Listen Lab has a big day upcoming on Wednesday as myself, Steven Gianakas, AuD, Michael Smith, AuD, and Matt Winn, AuD, PhD present posters and Justin Fleming, PhD gives a talk.
Since my last presentations of this work in 2022, the work has progressed to include cool new analyses on acoustic cue weighting guiding listeners' perception of vocal prosody. While the prior works helped us to understand that listeners with cochlear implants were more likely to make errors on identifying which word the talker was directing listener focus towards and that perception was weaker even when they could identify the intended focus, the current expansion helps us to understand how CI listeners are using acoustic cues to make these decisions. While there is a common perception among auditory scientists that cochlear implant users are not able to use frequency cues for a number of tasks, our results show that moreso than duration or intensity cues, CI listeners are using voice pitch to identify prosodic focus.
On the near horizon, this work will be moving towards psychophysical tasks to determine access of our test participants to these acoustic cues (not simply to what degree these CI listeners are weighting them in our behavioural task) and testing in noise that have been put forth in prior F-series grant applications upcoming.
If you have questions, or would like to learn more about this project, just reach out from the Contact Page!