The discrimination of voice cues in simulations of bimodal electro-acoustic cochlear-implant hearing

In discriminating speakers' voices, normal-hearing individuals effectively use two vocal characteristics, vocal pitch (related to fundamental frequency, F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL, related to speaker size). Typical cochlear-implant users show poor perception of these cues. However, in implant users with low-frequency residual acoustic hearing, this bimodal electro-acoustic stimulation may provide additional voice-related cues, such as low-numbered harmonics and formants, which could improve F0/VTL perception. In acoustic noise-vocoder simulations, where added low-pass filtered speech simulated residual hearing, a strong bimodal benefit was observed for F0 perception. No bimodal benefit was observed for VTL, which seems to mainly rely on vocoder spectral resolution.