Psychology 230: Research Methods Lab A

Introduction: Overview: A training program, under the lead of Professor Jeremy Loebach, was previously developed to help new adult cochlear implant users learn to hear. Users have taken part in a long term training paradigm that has had them identify speech sounds (phonemes, words, sentences), speakers, and environmental sounds. Stimuli for the cochlear implant users have been obtained from multiple recorded speaker sources. The primary issue is that not all speakers are equally “intelligible”, and if performance is to be judged on how well cochlear implant users can understand a speaker, speaker intelligibility is critical. Our project aims to explore “speaker intelligibility”. Additionally we desire to quantify how “intelligible” our speakers are, and how that contributes to the training data that is being gathered. To do that, we need to test talker intelligibility and come up with a metric by which to judge them.