Abstract
Children with severe to profound hearing loss fitted with cochlear implants (CIs) can develop speech with degraded auditory inputs. Little is known about how speech perception by CI users who developed speech through electrical hearing is affected by realistic reverberation—a source of additional degradation in acoustic inputs to the CI speech processor. Moreover, how these young CI users handle competing maskers with high informational masking, such as two-talker babble, in speech-in-noise perception is not well characterized. Both reverberation and competing maskers are relevant factors in everyday classroom listening scenarios. In this work, we studied a cohort of adolescents and young adults with early fitting of CIs. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured in five types of maskers: speech-shaped noise (SSN), SSN modulated by a speech envelope, two-talker babble in English and in French, and time-reversed two-talker English babble. SRTs from each masker type were repeated in an anechoic condition and two reverberation conditions mimicking a classroom meeting classroom acoustics standard versus a lecture hall. When compared with a group of age-matched normal-hearing listeners, young CI users showed steeper increase of masked SRTs by increasing reverberation but comparable release from informational masking. [Work supported by the Hearing Health Foundation.]
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