Pitch Scaling and Speech Understanding by Patients Who Use the Ineraid Cochlear Implant

Pitch scaling was assessed for 10 normal-hearing listeners and 8 patients who use the Ineraid multichannel cochlear implant. For two patients who were excellent users of the prosthesis, pitch increased over a wide range of frequencies (100 Hz to 2333-3000 Hz). For three patients who were above average users of the prosthesis, pitch increased with frequency over a smaller range (100 Hz to 1200-2300 Hz). For three patients who demonstrated poor word recognition ability, pitch increased with frequency over a very small range (100 Hz to 600-1000 Hz). These results suggest that differences in speech understanding among patients who use the Ineraid may be accounted for, in part, by the range of pitch available through the implant.