Analysis of speech and language communication for cochlear implant users in noisy lombard conditions

Acoustic/linguistic modification of speech production with respect to auditory feedback is an important research domain for robust human-to-human and human-to-machine communication. For instance, in the presence of environmental noise, a speaker experiences the well-known phenomenon termed as Lombard effect. Lombard effect has been well studied for normal hearing listeners as well as for automatic speech/speaker recognition systems. However, limited effort has been employed to study if the speech production of cochlear implant (CI) users is influenced by the auditory feedback. The purpose of this study is to analyze the speech production and natural language model of CI users with respect to environmental changes. A mobile personal audio recording from continuous single-session audio streams collected over an individual´s daily life was used for our study. The findings from this study will provide fundamental knowledge on the characteristics of speech production under Lombard effect in CI users. These specific variations in speech production can be leveraged in new algorithm development and further applications in speech systems to benefit cochlear implant users.?