EVALUATION OF THE NUCLEUS SPECTRA-22 PROCESSOR AND NEW SPEECH PROCESSING STRATEGY (SPEAK) IN POSTLINGUISTICALLY DEAFENED ADULTS

A new speech processing strategy (SPEAK) has been compared with the previous Multipeak (MPEAK) strategy in a study with 24 postlinguistically deafened adults. The results show that performance with the SPEAK coding strategy was significantly better for 58.3% of subjects on closed-set consonant identification, for 33.3% of subjects on closed-set vowel identification and open-set monosyllabic word recognition, and for 81.8% of subjects on open-set sentence recognition in quiet and in competing noise (+10 dB signal-to-noise ratio). By far the largest improvement observed was for sentence recognition in noise, with the mean score across subjects for the SPEAK strategy twice that obtained with MPEAK.