What is it about?
Speech understanding of CI users is mostly evaluated in stationary background noise. In such tests speech understanding scores are often surprisingly well. We wanted to know, how the same CI users perform when the background noise is fluctuating in time compared to non-fluctuating stationary background noise. Normal-hearing listeners are able to listen into the dips of fluctuating noise and extract glimpses of speech during those short dips which facilitates speech understanding especially when the background noise is loud compared to the target speech. As it turned out, even the best performing CI users couldn't make use of the dips.
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Photo by Oleg Zarevennyi on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This work explains why even very good performing CI users often report difficulties in complex listing situations e.g. in a cafeteria or in a restaurant.
Perspectives
The detrimental effect of fluctuating maskers on SRTs in CI users shown by prior studies was confirmed by the current study. Concluding, the absence of masking release is mainly caused by the technical and/or physiological properties of CI stimulation, not just the poorer baseline performance of many CI users compared to normal-hearing subjects. Speech understanding in modulated noise was more robust in CI users who had a relatively large electrical dynamic range.
Daniel Polterauer
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The effect of fluctuating maskers on speech understanding of high-performing cochlear implant users, International Journal of Audiology, February 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.3109/14992027.2015.1128124.
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