Pitch Perception Assessed by Frequency Difference Limen and Frequency Following Response

Abstract

The improvement of pitch perception is a hot spot in cochlear implant algorithm research. In order to provide objective and effective guidance for the algorithm research, psychoacoustic method and brainstem frequency following response (FFR) were studied in this paper to assess the ability of pitch perception among young people who exhibited the same normal hearing sensitivity. Eleven Chinese college students participated in both the psychoacoustic experiment and FFR experiment. Using pure tone as the stimulus, psychoacoustic frequency difference limen (FDL) and FFR neural pitch strength were measured. Both of them were used as parameters for evaluating pitch perception ability. FFR pitch strengths were extracted by three different methods which were autocorrelation, chirp z-transform and spectrogram. FFR pitch strengths correlated to a certain extent with FDL results and the FFR pitch strength by autocorrelation showed the highest degree of correlation. The results imply that in the same normal hearing population, features extracted from FFR signal can represent pitch perception ability of subjects. FFR features can be expected to become objective and effective parameters for assessing cochlear implant algorithms.