Effects of context in environmental sound perception in older normal hearing and cochlear implant listeners

Abstract

The use of context by individuals with hearing loss has been extensively studied in speech, but not in environmental sound perception. The effect of context on environmental sound perception was investigated in 26 older normal hearing (ONH) and 46 adult postlingual cochlear implant (CI) listeners. Participants first identified 24 individual environmental sounds in isolation and then were presented with the same sounds arranged in 3–5 sound sequences. Half of the sequences were either contextually coherent (i.e., likely to be heard together) and half were incoherent. Results revealed greater accuracy of ONH than CI listeners in identification of isolated environmental sounds. However, no group differences were observed in the identification of sounds sequences. In both groups contextually coherent sequences were identified more accurately than incoherent ones, while accuracy decreased with sequence length. Sequence length interacted with context, with context effect increasing for longer sequences. These findings demonstrate that environmental sound identification remains challenging for CI listeners. Nevertheless, both CI and ONH listeners utilize context to aid in environmental sound identification in perceptually challenging tasks associated with a greater working memory load. Future research may further assess the relationship between environmental sound perception and other ecologically significant aspects of electric hearing.