This required changing my PhD enrolment status to part-time. During this year I received word that the Bionic Ear Institute was needing a new Research Fellow for speech signal processing research. I jumped at the opportunity and am now working full-time at the Bionic Ear Institute. The Cochlear Implant has been implanted in thousands of people throughout the world. However, the benefit received from the implant varies considerably.
Some people can obtain near perfect perception of speech while others struggle.
This project will develop specialised signal processing techniques that will help to better distinguish the different speech sounds. My research involves careful examination of consonant and vowel confusions made by people using the implant. Implant users are tested on their perception of the 24 consonants and 19 vowels of Australian English. This creates confusion matrices which may be analysed to see which phonetic features are being perceived correctly. The remainder are either not adequately presented by the processing strategy or are not well perceived by the users.