Speech and Pitch Perception in Children with Cochlear Implants
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Pitch perception and speech recognition in children with cochlear implants
IRAS ID
122378
Contact name
Deborah Vickers
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London
Research summary
Cochlear implants (CI) for pre-lingually deafened children with severe-profound hearing losses have been shown to be beneficial for acquiring good hearing, speech and language skills. CIs code speech sounds by stimulating different electrodes when representing different frequencies in the organised pitch-place order arrangement of the cochlea. The devices often enable users to converse normally and sometimes even hear well in the presence of background noise.
However, some implant users have difficulty understanding spoken language despite being able to hear the softly spoken speech sounds such as “s”, “f” and “t”. This may be due to difficulty detecting the difference in frequency between the sounds.
This project will investigate if a computer game can be used to assess the pitch ranking ability of a child wearing a cochlear implant. Secondly we will assess if there is any correlation between pitch ranking and speech recognition in children with cochlear implants. The results of this study may show that pitch perception is a factor in speech recognition. If this is the case it will allow clinicians in the future to be able to amend the fitting of the cochlear implant to optimise pitch perception or to help therapists train pitch perception as part of the habilitation process which may improve listening skills.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - South Yorkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/YH/0298
Date of REC Opinion
4 Sep 2013
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion