A potential neurophysiological correlate of electric-acoustic pitch matching in adult cochlear implant users: Pilot data

Abstract

The overall goal of this study was to identify an objective physiological correlate of electric-acoustic pitch matching in unilaterally implanted cochlear implant (CI) participants with residual hearing in the non-implanted ear. Electrical and acoustic stimuli were presented in a continuously alternating fashion across ears. The acoustic stimulus and the electrical stimulus were either matched or mismatched in pitch. Auditory evoked potentials were obtained from nine CI users. Results indicated that N1 latency was stimulus-dependent, decreasing when the acoustic frequency of the tone presented to the non-implanted ear was increased. More importantly, there was an additional decrease in N1 latency in the pitch-matched condition. These results indicate the potential utility of N1 latency as an index of pitch matching in CI users.

Keywords:

• Electric-acoustic pitch matching
• Auditory evoked potential
• N1 latency

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Drs Arlene Neuman, Annette Zeman, Ksenia Prosolovich, Elizabeth Glassman, Keena Seward, Ben Guo and Wenjie Wang for their assistance during recruitment and testing of CI participants. We thank our participants for their help.

Disclaimer statements

Contributors Chin-Tuan Tan currently holds a joint Associate Professor position in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and School of Behavioral and Brain Science (Callier Center for Communication Disorders) at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to this position, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology, and, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the ECE Department at New York University. He was a Research Associate under the Auditory Perception Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge (UK).

Brett A. Martin is an Associate Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Science and in the Program in Audiology. She received training as a clinical audiologist at Northwestern University, and Ph.D. in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the Graduate Center.

Mario A. Svirsky trained as an electrical engineer in Uruguay, and as a Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. at Tulane University and LSU, where he specialized in speech and hearing sciences. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT's Speech Communication Group, where he stayed as a Research Scientist until he took a job at Indiana University in Indianapolis. He joined New York University in 2005 as the first Noel L. Cohen Professor of Hearing Science and Vice Chairman for Research in the Department of Otolaryngology-HNS.

ORCID

Chin-Tuan Tan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4676-4917

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD grants: DC010834 (CTT), DC03937 (MAS), DC011329 (MAS) and DC05386 (BAM) and PSC-CUNY (BAM). National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.