Across-frequency delays based on the cochlear traveling wave: Enhanced speech presentation for cochlear implants

Abstract

Cochlear implants stimulate the auditory nerve with the outputs of a bank of narrow-band filters. We propose that cochlear implant users are better able to perceive speech when these frequency bands are desynchronized, as occurs in the normal cochlea. The first part of this study was a computational investigation of across-frequency delays on the stimulation patterns generated by the advanced combination encoder (ACE) sound-processing strategy. By offsetting frequency bands from each other, fewer stimuli were discarded from voiced speech by maxima selection. Background noise, however, was not affected in this way. The second part of this study was an assessment of speech perception with acro..