Transfer of Auditory Perceptual Learning with Spectrally Reduced Speech to Speech and Nonspeech Tasks: Implications for Cochlear Implants

Conclusions: Listeners trained to identify noise-vocoded sentences showed evidence of transfer of perceptual learning to the identification of environmental sounds. In addition, the correlation between environmental sound identification and sentence transcription indicates that subjects who were better able to use the degraded acoustic information to identify the environmental sounds were also better able to transcribe the linguistic content of novel sentences. Both trained and untrained groups performed equally well (∼75% correct) on the gender-identification task, indicating that training did not have an effect on the ability to identify the gender of talkers. Although better than chance, performance on the talker discrimination task was poor overall (∼55%), suggesting that either explicit training is required to discriminate talkers’ voices reliably or that additional information (perhaps spectral in nature) not present in the vocoded speech is required to excel in such tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that although transfer of auditory perceptual learning with spectrally degraded speech does occur, explicit task-specific training may be necessary for tasks that cannot rely on temporal information alone.

from Ear and Hearing

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