Comparison of bimodal and bilateral cochlear implant users on speech recognition with competing talker music perception affective prosody discrimination and talker identification

摘要

ObjectivesDespite excellent performance in speech recognition in quiet, most cochlear implant users have great difficulty with speech recognition in noise, music perception, identifying tone of voice, and discriminating different talkers. This may be partly due to the pitch coding in cochlear implant speech processing. Most current speech processing strategies use only the envelope information; the temporal fine structure is discarded. One way to improve electric pitch perception is to utilize residual acoustic hearing via a hearing aid on the non-implanted ear (bimodal hearing). This study aimed to test the hypothesis that bimodal users would perform better than bilateral cochlear implant users on tasks requiring good pitch perception.