Michel Hoen

Cochlear Ltd

Objective: This prospective longitudinal cohort study at six tertiary referral centers in Canada and Denmark describes the clinical efficiency and surgical safety of cochlear implantation with the Oticon Medical Neuro cochlear implant system, including the Neuro Zti implant, the EVO electrode array, and the Neuro One sound processor. Methods: Pa...

Objective The aim of the present study was to investigate the pupillary response to word identification in cochlear implant (CI) patients. Authors hypothesized that when task difficulty (i.e., addition of background noise) increased, pupil dilation markers such as the peak dilation or the latency of the peak dilation would increase in CI users, as...

The Oticon Medical Neuro cochlear implant system includes the modes Opti Omni and Speech Omni, the latter providing beamforming (i.e., directional selectivity) in the high frequencies. Two studies compared sentence identification scores of adult cochlear implant users with Opti Omni and Speech Omni. In Study 1, a double-blind longitudinal crossover...

The present study investigates how electrically evoked Auditory Brainstem Responses (eABRs) can be used to measure local channel interactions along cochlear implant (CI) electrode arrays. eABRs were recorded from 16 experienced CI patients in response to electrical pulse trains delivered using three stimulation configurations: (1) single electrode...

Facial nerve stimulation (FNS) is a potential complication which may affect the auditory performance of children with cochlear implants (CIs). We carried out an exploratory prospective observational study to investigate the effects of the electrical stimulation pattern on FNS reduction in young children with CI. Ten ears of seven prelingually deafe...

Understanding cochlear anatomy is crucial for developing less traumatic electrode arrays and insertion guidance for cochlear implantation. The human cochlea shows considerable variability in size and morphology. This study analyses 1000+ clinical temporal bone CT images using a web-based image analysis tool. Cochlear size and shape parameters were...

Background: A prospective longitudinal multicentre study was conducted to assess the one-year postsurgical hearing preservation profile of the EVOTM electrode array. Methods: Fifteen adults presenting indications of electro-acoustic stimulation (pure-tone audiometry (PTA) thresholds ≤70 dB below 750 Hz) were implanted with the EVO™ electrode arr...

Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to e...

Introduction Electrically evoked auditory brainstem responses provide reliable clinical information to assist professionals in the auditory rehabilitation of cochlear implant users. Objective This study aimed to investigate intraoperative evoked auditory brainstem response recordings in Evo®-cochlear implant electrode array recipients and its corr...

Purpose For cochlear implant users, the ability to use the telephone is often seen as an important landmark during rehabilitation and an indicator of cochlear implant benefit. The goal of this study was to develop a short questionnaire exploring the ability to use the telephone in cochlear implant users, named Telislife, and test it in a group of e...

Objective: This study investigated the audiological and tinnitus outcomes of cochlear implantation (CI) in adults with single-sided deafness (SSD) and tinnitus. Study design: Multicentered prospective, non-randomized intervention study. Setting: Six French CI centers. Patients: Twenty-six patients with SSD and incapacitating tinnitus (Tinnit...

Objective: This study evaluated the outcomes of the Oticon Medical Neuro Zti cochlear implant and the Neuro 2 sound processor. Design: Neuro One users were upgraded to Neuro 2. Monosyllabic word identification was evaluated in adults with Neuro One after ≥5 months, with Neuro 2 at upgrade, and with Neuro 2 after 3 months. Self-reported listening ab...

Cochlear implants (CI) constitute a major success in the development of neural protheses, with today an estimated 500k users worldwide. Some challenges however remain, including large interindividual variability in audiological outcomes, in particular in difficult listening situations. Improving our understanding of the cognitive processes underlyi...

Objective: To propose a method for quantitative assessment of the migration of lateral-wall, straight electrode arrays after surgery based on postoperative Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) images and automated medical image analysis techniques. Methods: A preliminary study is conducted on 19 implanted ears. For each implantation, two CBCT image...

Native listeners process and understand homophones, such as la locution 'the phrase' vs. l'allo-cution 'the speech', both [lalɔkysjɔ̃ ], without much semantical ambiguity in connected speech. Yet, behavioral experiments show that disambiguation is partial under intra-speaker variability without semantical context. To investigate electrophysiologica...

Technological advances in the domain of digital signal processing adapted to cochlear implants (CI) are partially responsible for the ever-improving outcomes observed with this neural prosthesis. The goal of the present study was to evaluate audiometric outcomes with a new signal processing strategy implemented in Oticon Medical-Neurelec cochlear i...

Background: Cochlear implants (CIs) are neural prostheses that have been used routinely in the clinic over the past 25 years. They allow children who were born profoundly deaf, as well as adults affected by hearing loss for whom conventional hearing aids are insufficient, to attain a functional level of hearing. The "modern" CI (i.e., a multi-elec...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential improvements of speech perception and sound quality provided by a multiband single channel noise-reduction algorithm based on the modified Wiener-filter adapted to cochlear implant sound processing. Design: This study was a longitudinal trial with a repeated-measures design. Outcome...

A vast majority of dyslexic children exhibit a phonological deficit, particularly noticeable in phonemic identification or discrimination tasks. The gap in performance between dyslexic and normotypical listeners appears to decrease into adulthood, suggesting that some individuals with dyslexia develop compensatory strategies. Some dyslexic adults h...

Summary of the characteristics of the dyslexic and normal-reading subgroups. (DOCX)

Introduction The preservation of residual hearing is currently an important challenge for cochlear implant surgeries. Indeed, if patients exhibit functional hearing after cochlear implantation, they can benefit from the combination of acoustical stimulation, usually in the low-frequencies and electrical stimulation in the high-frequencies. This com...

This study aimed to quantify outcomes in a group of patients who were implanted with an Oticon Medical Neurelec (Vallauris, France) cochlear implant system, the Digisonic® SP/Saphyr® Neo. Ten participants took part in this preliminary study. Their speech perception capacities were evaluated at 3, 6, and 12-months after cochlear implant activation a...

The purpose of the present study was to test the behavior of two different generations of cochlear implant systems subjected to a clinical radiotherapy scheme and to determine the maximal acceptable cumulative radiation levels at which the devices show out-of-specification behaviors. Using stereotactic irradiation (Cyberknife, 6 MV photon beam), th...

It is now well established that extensive musical training percolates to higher levels of cognition, such as speech processing. However, the lack of a precise technique to investigate the specific listening strategy involved in speech comprehension has made it difficult to determine how musicians’ higher performance in non-speech tasks contributes...

Although there is a large consensus regarding the involvement of specific acoustic cues in speech perception, the precise mechanisms underlying the transformation from continuous acoustical properties into discrete perceptual units remains undetermined. This gap in knowledge is partially due to the lack of a turnkey solution for isolating critical...

The rationalized arcsine transform is used to transform data obtained from speech intelligibility tests in order to make them suitable for parametric statistical analyzes. The arcsine transform expresses scores in radians and the rationalized arcsine transform adjusts these scores into units resembling percentages, making them easier to interpret a...

This research examines the nature of the interference that occurs during speech-in-speech processing for late bilingual listeners. Native French-speaking listeners with Italian as their L2 performed a lexical decision task with French target words presented amid background speech (i.e., 4-talker babble) and nonspeech background noise (i.e., speech-...

The reported studies have aimed to investigate whether informational masking in a multi-talker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target using an adapted semantic priming paradigm. In 3 experiments, participants were required to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in backgrounds composed of 1...

An essential step in understanding the processes underlying the general mechanism of perceptual categorization is to identify which portions of a physical stimulation modulate the behavior of our perceptual system. More specifically, in the context of speech comprehension, it is still a major open challenge to understand which information is used t...

In the present study, we investigated brain morphological signatures of dyslexia by using a voxel-based asymmetry analysis. Dyslexia is a developmental disorder that affects the acquisition of reading and spelling abilities and is associated with a phonological deficit. Speech perception disabilities have been associated with this deficit, particul...

An essential step in understanding the processes underlying the general mechanism of perceptual categorization is to identify which portions of a physical stimulation modulate the responses of our perceptual system. More specifically, in the context of speech comprehension, it is still unclear what information is used to categorize a speech stimulu...

This study aimed to characterize the linguistic interference that occurs during speech-in-speech comprehension by combining offline and online measures, which included an intelligibility task (at a 25 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and 2 lexical decision tasks (at a 25 dB and 0 dB SNR) that were performed with French spoken target words. In these 3 expe...

Our research aims at exploring the nature of the interferences that occur during the speech-in-speech situation. French target words were inserted in 2 types of backgrounds: (i) 4-talker babble spoken in various languages such as French, Italian or Irish, containing acoustic and linguistic information, (ii) fluctuating noise derived from each 4-tal...

This study investigates masking effects occurring during speech comprehension in the presence of concurrent speech signals. We examined the differential effects of 4- to 8-talker babble (natural speech) or babble-like noise (reversed speech) on word identification. We measured phoneme identification rates. Results showed that different types of lin...

Many neurocognitive aspects associated with the processing of speech were up to now studied by the analysis of event-related potentials. However, none of these cortical responses can be considered as a direct indicator of successful lexical access during speech comprehension. The aim of the present study is to develop an experimental paradigm and a...

RESUME ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Nos recherches visent à explorer les interférences linguistiques qui ont lieu dans la situation de compréhension de la parole dans la parole. Pour cela, l'intensité, la nature et la langue du bruit de fond concurrent ont été manipulée...

RESUME ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Cette étude vise à tester l'automaticité du traitement sémantique durant la perception de la parole grâce à la situation de cocktail party. Les participants devaient effectuer une tâche de décision lexicale sur un item cible inséré da...

RESUME ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Nous avons examiné les corrélats électrophysiologiques de la sensibilité des auditeurs aux indices acoustiques fins en condition de variabilité intra-locuteur dans le but de tester la pertinence de tels indices durant le traitement de...

Developmental dyslexia is associated with impaired speech-in-noise perception. The goal of the present research was to further characterize this deficit in dyslexic adults. In order to specify the mechanisms and processing strategies used by adults with dyslexia during speech-in-noise perception, we explored the influence of background type, presen...

Most psycholinguistic models of lexical access, although making different proposals regarding nature of compet i-tors, postulate that word identification is the result of strong competitive mechanisms between simultan eously activated lexical candidates (see for example NAM, Luce and Pisoni, 1998; the revised Cohort model, Marslen -Wilson et al., 1...

Our research aims at exploring psycholinguistic processes implicated in the speech-in-speech situation. Our studies focused on the interferences observed during speech-in-speech comprehension. Our goal is to clarify if interferences exist only on an acoustical level or if there are clear psycholinguistic interferences. In 3 experiments, we used 4 t...

In a first paper (Mülder, Rogiers and Hoen, the 6 th ~7 th volume of Speech and Hearing Review), we have reviewed actual views on Auditory Processing Disorders (APD), their definition, etiology, diagnosis and the actual consensus on APD management strategies. In this second article, we proposed to report on recent experimental work done on the mana...

When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological mec...

This study tested the use of binaural cues in adult dyslexic listeners during speech-in-noise comprehension. Participants listened to words presented in three different noise-types (Babble-, Fluctuating- and Stationary-noise) in three different listening configurations: dichotic, monaural and binaural. In controls, we obtained an important informat...

The current research extends our framework for embodied language and action comprehension to include a teleological representation that allows goal-based reasoning for novel actions. The objective of this work is to implement and demonstrate the advantages of a hybrid, embodied-teleological approach to action-language interaction, both from a theor...

La dyslexie est un trouble de l'apprentissage de la lecture et de l'écriture, en l'absence de déficits neurologiques ou intellectuels. Des troubles auditifs sont par ailleurs fréquemment associés, parmi lesquels on note des déficits de la compréhension de la parole dans le bruit (Cunningham & al., 2001 ; Ziegler & al., 2007). Une autre caractéristi...

This study aimed at characterizing the cognitive processes that come into play during speech-in-speech comprehension by examining lexical competitions between target speech and concurrent multi-talker babble. We investigated the effects of number of simultaneous talkers (2, 4, 6 or 8) and of the token frequency of the words that compose the babble...

This experiment tested the advantage of binaural presentation of an interfering noise in a task involving identification of monaurally-presented words. These words were embedded in three types of noise: a stationary noise, a speech-modulated noise and a speech-babble noise, in order to assess energetic and informational masking contributions to bin...

This article addresses issues in embodied sentence processing from a "cognitive neural systems" approach that combines analysis of the behavior in question, analysis of the known neurophysiological bases of this behavior, and the synthesis of a neuro-computational model of embodied sentence processing that can be applied to and tested in the contex...

Purpose This study investigates the ability to understand degraded speech signals and explores the correlation between this capacity and the functional characteristics of the peripheral auditory system. Method The authors evaluated the capability of 50 normal-hearing native French speakers to restore time-reversed speech. The task required them to...

A central issue in cognitive neuroscience today concerns how distributed neural networks in the brain that are used in language learning and processing can be involved in non-linguistic cognitive sequence learning. This issue is informed by a wealth of functional neurophysiology studies of sentence comprehension, along with a number of recent studi...

Robot platforms have now reached a level of technical development wherein they are becoming physically capable of useful interaction with humans, while ensuring safety and reasonable cost. The current challenge is for cognitive systems science to provide these robots with the necessary capabilities so that they can interact and cooperate with human...

In a recent paper, Veuillet et al., (2007) suggested that some auditory processing mechanism could be impaired in children with dyslexia. They reported a link between children's ability to perceive phonemic boundaries and the physiological functionality of their medial olivocochlear system (MOC), an auditory efferent pathway functioning under centr...

Results from our former research on the characterization of informational masking effects occurring during speech-in-speech comprehension showed that phonological and lexical information create specific informational masking effects, depending on the number of speakers involved (Hoen et al., 2007). The goal of the present study was to better charac...

This study investigates masking effects occurring during speech comprehension in the presence of concurrent speech signals. We examined the differential effects of acoustic–phonetic and lexical content of 4- to 8-talker babble (natural speech) or babble-like noise (reversed speech) on word identification. Behavioral results show a monotonic decreas...

With this research we investigated the real-time electrophysiological correlates of noun–verb agreement checking during the comprehension of correct passive sentences in French. Event-related potentials were acquired while participants read passive sentences that contained covert (singular, masculine) or overt (plural, feminine) noun–verb agreement...

Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) is a condition in which patients are experiencing listening difficulties in the absence of clearly identifiable peripheral auditory deficit. Therefore, patients with APD typically have normal pure tone thresholds but experience difficulties in various auditory tasks including mainly sound localization or speech co...

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One of the functions of everyday human language is to communicate meaning. Thus, when one hears or reads the sentence, “John gave a book to Mary,” some aspect of an event concerning the transfer of possession of a book from John to Mary is (hopefully) transmitted. One theoretical approach to language referred to as construction grammar emphasizes t...

The current research provides a theoretical, computational and neurophysiological framework in which particular aspects of sentence comprehension and non-linguistic sequence transformation processing are implemented by a common neural mechanism for structure mapping. The theoretical context is derived from construction grammar theory in which langu...

The determining of brain regions that exhibit specific activity during sentence comprehension compared to other non-linguistic cognitive tasks constitutes one of the important challenges in the domain of functional neuroimaging of the faculty of language. In the current paper we report an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI...

This paper presents results from an experiment studying the cognitive ability to understand a speech signal in a babble background noise. We further tested subject's sensitivity to characteristics of target and competitor words. Our results show that words are better reconstructed than pseudowords. Intelligibility of words is not influenced by a ch...

In the context of language processing, the N280 is an anterior negative event-related potential profile associated with the lexical categorization of grammatical function words versus content words. Subsequent studies suggested that this effect was related to word statistics including length and frequency in the lexicon. The current research tests...