Perception of amplitude envelope variations of pulsatile electrotactile stimuli

Abstract

Gross variations of the speech amplitude envelope, such as the duration of different segments and the gaps between them, carry information about prosody and some segmental features of vowels and consonants. The amplitude envelope is one parameter encoded by the Tickle Talker, an electrotactile speech processor for the hearing impaired which stimulates the digital nerve bundles with a pulsatile electric current. Psychophysical experiments measuring the duration discrimination and identification, gap detection, and integration times for pulsatile electrical stimulation are described and compared with similar auditory measures for normal and impaired hearing and electrical stimulation via a coc..