The Contribution of Matched Envelope Dynamic Range to the Binaural Benefits in Simulated Bilateral Electric Hearing

Abstract

This study examined the effects of envelope dynamic-range mismatch on the intelligibility of Mandarin speech in noise by simulated bilateral electric hearing. Noise-vocoded Mandarin speech, corrupted by speech-shaped noise at 5 and 0 dB signal-to-noise ratios, was presented unilaterally or bilaterally to 10 normal-hearing listeners for recognition. For unilateral conditions, the right ear was presented with the 8-channel noise-vocoded stimuli generated using a 15-dB envelope dynamic range (DR). To simulate the envelope DR mismatch between the 2 ears, the left ear was presented with the 8-channel noise-vocoded stimuli generated using a 5-, 10-, or 15-dB envelope DR, respectively. Significant binaural summation benefits for Mandarin speech recognition were observed only with matched envelope DR between the 2 ears. With reduced DR, the performance of tone identification was more consistent in the steady-state speech-shaped noise than that of sentence recognition. Consistent with previous findings, the present results suggest that Mandarin speech-perception performance of bilateral electric listening in noise is affected by the difference of envelope DR between the 2 implanted ears, and the binaural summation benefits are maximized when DR mismatch is minimized between the 2 implanted ears.