The recognition of vowels produced by men, women, boys, and girls by cochlear implant patients using a six-channel CIS processor.

Five patients who used a six-channel, continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) cochlear implant were presented vowels, in two experiments, from a large sample of men, women, boys, and girls for identification. At issue in the first experiment was whether vowels from one speaker group, i.e., men, were more identifiable than vowels from other speaker groups. At issue in the second experiment was the role of the fifth and sixth channels in the identification of vowels from the different speaker groups. It was found in experiment 1 that (i) the vowels produced by men were easier to identify than vowels produced by any of the other speaker groups, (ii) vowels from women and boys were more difficult to identify than vowels from men but less difficult than vowels from girls, and (iii) vowels from girls were more difficult to identify than vowels from all other groups. In experiment 2 removal of channels 5 and 6 from the processor impaired the identification of vowels produced by women, boys and girls but did not impair the identification of vowels produced by men. The results of experiment 1 demonstrate that scores on tests of vowels produced by men overestimate the ability of patients to recognize vowels in the broader context of multi-talker communication. The results of experiment 2 demonstrate that channels 5 and 6 become more important for vowel recognition as the second formants of the speakers increase in frequency.