Adults are better than children at understanding cochlear-implant simulations, even after practice

What is it about?

Cochlear implants are bionic auditory prostheses that provide degraded sound representations to the brain. Both adults and children with normal hearing can understand this degraded speech well. We played these implant simulations to adults and children with normal hearing and found across a wide range of conditions (different words/sentences, different levels of background noise) and after extended practice, adults were always better than children at understanding this type of degraded speech.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Simulations are great for understanding how real cochlear implants work by simplifying the number of things you have to consider. This research is important because it tells us that comparisons between adults and children using these simulations are valid with or without training. This is important because that means we do not need long testing session with children, who tend to have shorter attention spans.