Bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant listeners can segregate competing speech using talker sex cues, but not spatial cues.

Shelby Willis,Quinton Gopen,Mathew Thomas,Akira Ishiyama,John J Galvin,Kevin Xu,Qian-Jie Fu

doi:10.1121/10.0003049

Shelby Willis, Quinton Gopen + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003049

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Abstract

Cochlear implant (CI) users have greater difficulty perceiving talker sex and spatial cues than do normal-hearing (NH) listeners. The present study measured recognition of target sentences in the presence of two co-located or spatially separated speech maskers in NH, bilateral CI, and bimodal CI listeners; masker sex was the same as or different than the target. NH listeners demonstrated a large masking release with masker sex and/or spatial cues. For CI listeners, significant masking release was observed with masker sex cues, but not with spatial cues, at least for the spatially symmetrically placed maskers and listening task used in this study.

Highlights

Conversation often requires understanding communication from a specific target that may be masked by competing speech
Mean Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for Cochlear implant (CI) listeners were highest for the spatial cue condition and lowest for the masker sex cue condition
Post hoc Bonferroni-adjusted pairwise comparisons showed that for CI listeners, SRTs were significantly poorer for the spatial cue condition than for the masker sex or masker sex þ spatial cue conditions (p < 0.05 in both cases); there were no significant differences asa.scitation.org/journal/jel among the remaining segregation cue conditions (p > 0.05 in all cases)

Summary

Introduction

Conversation often requires understanding communication from a specific target that may be masked by competing speech. Listeners can use various cues to segregate competing speech, such as differences in talker sex and/or spatial locations between the target and masker speech. Bilateral (CI in both ears) and bimodal (low-frequency acoustic hearing in one ear, CI in the other) listeners can take advantage of spatial cues to segregate target speech from maskers. Bilateral and bimodal CI listeners do not appear to be able to consistently take advantage of spatial cues for this listening environment This deficit may be due to differences in spectro-temporal resolution across ears, acoustic-electric amplitude mapping in the hearing device, frequency mismatch across ears, better-ear effects (where one ear has a better spectro-temporal representation than the other), and/or poor perception of inter-aural time differences (Hu et al, 2018)

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