Abstract
While cochlear implantation has benefitted many patients with single-sided deafness (SSD), there is great variability in cochlear implant (CI) outcomes and binaural performance remains poorer than that of normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Differences in sound quality across ears—temporal fine structure (TFS) information with acoustic hearing vs. coarse spectro-temporal envelope information with electric hearing—may limit integration of acoustic and electric patterns. Binaural performance may also be limited by inter-aural mismatch between the acoustic input frequency and the place of stimulation in the cochlea. SSD CI patients must learn to accommodate these differences between acoustic and electric stimulation to maximize binaural performance. It is possible that training may increase and/or accelerate accommodation and further improve binaural performance. In this study, we evaluated lateralization training in NH subjects listening to broad simulations of SSD CI signal processing. A 16-channel vocoder was used to simulate the coarse spectro-temporal cues available with electric hearing; the degree of inter-aural mismatch was varied by adjusting the simulated insertion depth (SID) to be 25 mm (SID25), 22 mm (SID22) and 19 mm (SID19) from the base of the cochlea. Lateralization was measured using headphones and head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). Baseline lateralization was measured for unprocessed speech (UN) delivered to the left ear to simulate SSD and for binaural performance with the acoustic ear combined with the 16-channel vocoders (UN+SID25, UN+SID22 and UN+SID19). After completing baseline measurements, subjects completed six lateralization training exercises with the UN+SID22 condition, after which performance was re-measured for all baseline conditions. Post-training performance was significantly better than baseline for all conditions (p < 0.05 in all cases), with no significant difference in training benefits among conditions. Given that there was no significant difference between the SSD and the SSD CI conditions before or after training, the results suggest that NH listeners were unable to integrate TFS and coarse spectro-temporal cues across ears for lateralization, and that inter-aural mismatch played a secondary role at best. While lateralization training may benefit SSD CI patients, the training may largely improve spectral analysis with the acoustic ear alone, rather than improve integration of acoustic and electric hearing.
Highlights
While cochlear implantation has been shown to improve sound source localization in patients with single-sided deafness (SSD), there is great variability in localization performance among SSD cochlear implant (CI) patients (Vermeire and Van de Heyning, 2009; Arndt et al, 2011; Firszt et al, 2012; Kamal et al, 2012; Távora-Vieira et al, 2013; Tokita et al, 2014; van Zon et al, 2015; Dorman et al, 2016)
The individual data points for all subjects could be found in Supplementary Table S1
Post hoc Tukey pairwise comparisons showed that root mean square error (RMSE) for Runs 5 and 6 were significantly lower than for Runs 1 and 2 (p < 0.05 in all cases)
Summary
While cochlear implantation has been shown to improve sound source localization in patients with single-sided deafness (SSD), there is great variability in localization performance among SSD cochlear implant (CI) patients (Vermeire and Van de Heyning, 2009; Arndt et al, 2011; Firszt et al, 2012; Kamal et al, 2012; Távora-Vieira et al, 2013; Tokita et al, 2014; van Zon et al, 2015; Dorman et al, 2016). Depending on the length of the array, the insertion depth, and the pattern of nerve survival (all of which comprise the electrode-neural interface), CI patients often experience some degree of intra-aural frequency mismatch between the acoustic input and the electrode place of stimulation. While CI users are able to partly adapt to intra- and inter-aural frequency mismatch as they gain experience with their device (Fu et al, 2002; Svirsky et al, 2004, 2015; Reiss et al, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2015; Vermeire et al, 2015), adaptation may not be complete. It is possible that explicit training may help SSD CI patients better integrate acoustic and electric hearing and improve localization performance
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