Integration of temporal masking into the MP3000 Coding strategy

Objective: Evaluation of speech intelligibility benefit by addition of a temporal masking model to the MP3000 speech coding strategy. Study Design: A crossover design was used to compare variants of the new temporal masking strategy TPACE with respect to the clinical MP3000 strategy. Setting: The study was a prospective, within-subject, repeated-measure experiments.Patients: The study group consisted of 24 postlingually deaf subjects with a minimum of six months experience after CI activation.Intervention: Five conditions were evaluated: The original MP3000 algorithm and the TPACE with four different settings of the temporal masking parameter.Main Outcome Measures: Speech perception test in Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT) noise at 15 to 5 dB SNR. Results: Average speech intelligibility improved with TPACE (T½ = 0.5 ms) by 10 % to 11% compared to MP3000. Conclusion: The addition of temporal masking to the simultaneous masking model of MP3000 could improve the speech intelligibility in noise