14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

French Distinctive Feature Confusions in Adult Cochlear Implantees

Christian Cavé (1), Gislaine De Smet (2), Jean-Marie Triglia (3)

(1) ESA CNRS 6057, Universite de Provence, Aix-en-Pror?ence, Fkance (2) Service ORL, Hôpital de Toulon-La Seyne, France (3) Service ORL, Hôpital de La Timone, Marseille, France

French distinctive feature confusions were analyzed in a group of ten cochlear implantees. All were post-lingual deaf persons who had undergone cochlear implant surgery at least one year before the time of the examination. Six subjects had a Digisonic (MXM) implant with 15 electrodes and four had a Spectra 22 (Nucleus) implant with 22 electrodes. For the experiment, we used the French minimal pair test in which the two words in a pair differ by only one distinctive feature. The compactness feature was the most adversely affected, with an identification error rate of 32.36%, followed by the graveness feature with 28.26%. The sustention feature was the most robust, with an error rate of only 10.76%. This error pattern is quite similar to the one observed in normal-hearing subjects under various speech conditions. The results showed that place-of-articulation features are the least well discriminated and the most difficult to code in implants.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cavé, Christian / Smet, Gislaine De / Triglia, Jean-Marie (1999): "French distinctive feature confusions in adult cochlear implantees", In ICPhS-14, 787-788.