CI Voice Assessments
Seeking speech pathology grad students to rate cochlear implant users' vocal qualities.
In a prior study (Auditory First Impressions), listeners clicked on squares in a PowerPoint slide to hear a different person reading a couple sentences. They then arranged the speakers into groups that sounded similar to them. Unknown to them, many of the speakers were born deaf and had used cochlear implants since childhood, which can make their speech hard to understand or give them an "accent" of sorts. In past studies in a larger project about Impressions of Cochlear Implant User Speech, listeners' first impressions of CI users were less positive than those of people with typical hearing (TH), even when every word is intelligible. What do listeners pick up on that makes even perfectly intelligible speakers sound different to them?
Could it be voice quality? This pilot study used auditory voice assessment reports from advanced speech pathology grad students to explore aspects of voice quality like pitch, loudness, creakiness, rate, rhythm, and nasality that might contribute to the perception of a "deaf accent." Results were used to narrow down acoustic features to measure in exploring the Auditory First Impressions groupings.
Presentations
- Freeman, V. (2019, November). Speech intelligibility, deaf speech quality, and personality ratings. American Speech-Language-Hearing (ASHA), Orlando, FL.
Related Work
- Part of the Impressions of Cochlear Implant User Speech project
- Prior step: Auditory First Impressions
Student Corner
Students
- Jenna Curran
Data and Materials
- See the main project Student Corner (Impressions of CI User Speech) for details about sentences, speaker intelligibility scores, etc. See the Auditory First Impressions Student Corner for details about the speech samples that were rated here.
- Voice ratings of 24 CI and 12 TH speech samples from 5 second-year speech pathology grad students
- Voice rating sheets, flyers, consent, IRB forms, etc.