This study compared spatial speech-in-noise performance in two cochlear implant (CI) patient groups: bimodal listeners, who use a hearing aid contralaterally to support their impaired acoustic hearing, and listeners with contralateral normal hearing, i.e., who were single-sided deaf before implantation. Using a laboratory setting that controls for head movements and that simulates spatial acoustic scenes, speech reception thresholds were measured for frontal speech-in-stationary noise from the front, the left, or the right side. Spatial release from masking (SRM) was then extracted from speech reception thresholds for monaural and binaural listening. SRM was found to be significantly lower in bimodal CI than in CI single-sided deaf listeners. Within each listener group, the SRM extracted from monaural listening did not differ from the SRM extracted from binaural listening. In contrast, a normal-hearing control group showed a significant improvement in SRM when using two ears in comparison to one. Neither CI group showed a binaural summation effect; that is, their performance was not improved by using two devices instead of the best monaural device in each spatial scenario. The results confirm a “listening with the better ear” strategy in the two CI patient groups, where patients benefited from using two ears/devices instead of one by selectively attending to the better one. Which one is the better ear, however, depends on the spatial scenario and on the individual configuration of hearing loss.
This study investigated the speech intelligibility benefit of using two different spatial noise reduction algorithms in cochlear implant (CI) users who use a hearing aid (HA) on the contralateral side (bimodal CI users). The study controlled for head movements by using head-related impulse responses to simulate a realistic cafeteria scenario and controlled for HA and CI manufacturer differences by using the master hearing aid platform (MHA) to apply both hearing loss compensation and the noise reduction algorithms (beamformers). Ten bimodal CI users with moderate to severe hearing loss contralateral to their CI participated in the study, and data from nine listeners were included in the data analysis. The beamformers evaluated were the adaptive differential microphones (ADM) implemented independently on each side of the listener and the (binaurally implemented) minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR). For frontal speech and stationary noise from either left or right, an improvement (reduction) of the speech reception threshold of 5.4 dB and 5.5 dB was observed using the ADM, and 6.4 dB and 7.0 dB using the MVDR, respectively. As expected, no improvement was observed for either algorithm for colocated speech and noise. In a 20-talker babble noise scenario, the benefit observed was 3.5 dB for ADM and 7.5 dB for MVDR. The binaural MVDR algorithm outperformed the bilaterally applied monaural ADM. These results encourage the use of beamformer algorithms such as the ADM and MVDR by bimodal CI users in everyday life scenarios.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.