Analytic importance of the coding features for the discrimination of vowels in the cochlear implant signal.

: The present study considers the analytic importance of the excitation pulse features delivered by a Nucleus cochlear implant using the F0F1F2 strategy. Four cochlear implant patients and 10 speakers uttering two 48-item lists constructed from four basic French vowels participated in this study. Patterns were presented to the patients and played at the input of an acquisition system in order to record the pulse features. Confusion matrices obtained with the patients and with automatic recognition procedures were then compared in order to find out the best-matching models simulating the patients' performances, out of 255 possibilities. The automatic recognition was carried out according to fuzzy logic based on the elementary features of the pulses coding the vowels. Results show that the essential features strongly depended on the subject.