Summary of “Reintroducing the High-frequency Region to Speech Perception Research” Special Session

This paper summarizes a special session entitled “Reintroducing the high-frequency region to speech perception research” presented during the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. The three-part session was co-sponsored by the Speech Communication and Psychological and Physiological Acoustics technical committees. Researchers in speech perception, psychoacoustics, digital signal processing, and speech production presented new evidence for the existence of useful information in the high-frequency end of the speech spectrum. The potential of the high-frequency range has not yet been fully explored, but there might be important implications of the high-frequency region for the development of cochlear implants, hearing aids, cell phones and other communication technologies that are just now beginning to utilize this high-frequency range. This session brought together researchers from several related fields to present the current state of the art.