Influence of voice similarity on talker discrimination in children with normal hearing and cochlear implants

The perception of voice similarity was examined in 5-year-old children with normal hearing sensitivity and, in pediatric cochlear implant users, 5-12 years of age. Recorded sentences were manipulated to form a continuum of similar-sounding voices. An adaptive procedure was then used to determine how acoustically different, in terms of average fundamental and formant frequencies, 2 sentences needed to be for a child to categorize the sentences as spoken by 2 different talkers. The average spectral characteristics of 2 utterances (including their fundamental frequencies) needed to differ by at least 11%-16% (2-2.5 semitones) for normal-hearing children to perceive the voices as belonging to different talkers. Introducing differences in the linguistic content of the 2 sentences to be compared did not change performance. Although several children with cochlear implants performed similarly to normal-hearing children, most found the task very difficult. Pediatric cochlear implant users who scored above the group mean of 64% of words correct on a monosyllabic open-set word identification task categorized the voices more like children with normal hearing sensitivity.