Acoustic simulations of cochlear implants allow comprehensive evaluation of not only perceptual performance under impoverished listening conditions but also relative contributions of classical spectral and temporal cues to speech recognition. Conventional simulations use continuous sinusoidal or noise carriers, lacking the vital pulsatile characteristics in a typical cochlear-implant processing strategy. The present study employed Gaussian-enveloped tones (GETs) as a discrete carrier to simulate the electric pulse train in modern cochlear implants. Two types of GET vocoders were implemented and evaluated in normal-hearing listeners to compare their performance to actual cochlear-implant performance. In the first implementation, GETs with different durations were used to simulate electric current interaction across channels that produced vowel and consonant recognition similar to the actual cochlear-implant result. In the second implementation, a direct mapping from electric pulses to GETs was developed to simulate a widely-used clinical n-of-m strategy in cochlear implants. The GET processing simulated the actual implant speech in noise perception in terms of the overall trend, the absolute mean scores, and their standard deviations. The present results demonstrated that the pulsatile GET vocoders simulate the cochlear implant performance more accurately than the conventional sinusoid or noise vocoders.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This research was supported by NIH R01 DC15587 (F.G.Z.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (11704129 and 61771320), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation Grant (2020A1515010386), and Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou (202102020944) (Q.M.).

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University of California Irvine Institutional Review Board and Medical Ethics Committee of Shenzhen University gave ethical approval for this work.

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