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 pr evious Multipeak (MPEAK) strategy in a study with 24 postlinguisticall y deafened adults. The results show that performance with the SPEAK co ding strategy was significantly better for 58.3% of subjects on closed -set consonant identification, for 33.3% of subjects on closed-set vow el identification and open-set monosyllabic word recognition, and for 81.8% of subjects on open-set sentence recognition in quiet and in com peting noise (+10 dB signal-to-noise ratio). By far the largest improv ement observed was for sentence recognition in noise, with the mean sc ore across subjects for the SPEAK strategy twice that obtained with MP EAK.