Abstract
The ability to attend to target speech in background noise is an important skill, particularly for children who spend many hours in noisy environments. Intelligibility improves as a result of spatial or binaural unmasking in the free-field for normal-hearing children; however, children who use bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) demonstrate little benefit in similar situations. It was hypothesized that poor auditory attention abilities might explain the lack of unmasking observed in children with BiCIs. Target and interferer speech stimuli were presented to either or both ears of BiCI participants via their clinical processors. Speech reception thresholds remained low when the target and interferer were in opposite ears, but they did not show binaural unmasking when the interferer was presented to both ears and the target only to one ear. These results demonstrate that, in the most extreme cases of stimulus separation, children with BiCIs can ignore an interferer and attend to target speech, but there is weak or absent binaural unmasking. It appears that children with BiCIs mostly experience poor encoding of binaural cues rather than deficits in ability to selectively attend to target speech.
Highlights
This work seeks to understand the mechanisms related to children’s ability to hear and understand speech in a noisy room, and to attend to and engage in conversation with one person while ignoring others who are talking in the background
In contrast to the aforementioned free-field studies where both ears receive sound source information from each location, this study investigated nonspatial factors— selective auditory attention—to provide further insight into weak effects of spatial unmasking observed to date in children with bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs)
With the interferer in the ear opposite to the target, Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were poorer than the quiet condition by about 8 dB. This difference is similar to the finding of Goupell et al (2016) in adults with BiCIs, which suggests that children with BiCIs were able to ignore an interferer in the opposite ear and attend to the target in a manner that is similar to adults
Summary
This work seeks to understand the mechanisms related to children’s ability to hear and understand speech in a noisy room, and to attend to and engage in conversation with one person while ignoring others who are talking in the background. Binaural hearing and selective auditory attention impact an individual’s ability to successfully function in noisy environments. They are especially important for children because they spend a great deal of time in noisy environments such as classrooms, playgrounds, and cafeterias, where successful communication is critical for their educational and social development. Masking of speech sounds can be somewhat alleviated by spatially separating the target sound source of interest from interferers that are either irrelevant or interesting sounds, both potentially distracting. The improvement in speech understanding when target and interferers are spatially separated, compared with when they are co-located, is known as spatial release from masking (Kidd et al, 2010) or spatial unmasking (Dirks & Wilson, 1969). Previous work shows that spatial unmasking is demonstrated in normal-hearing (NH) children as young as 2 to 3 years of age (Garadat & Litovsky, 2007; Hess et al, 2018)
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