Binaural pitch fusion is the fusion of dichotically presented tones that evoke different pitches between the ears. In normal-hearing (NH) listeners, the frequency range over which binaural pitch fusion occurs is usually <0.2 octaves. Recently, broad fusion ranges of 1-4 octaves were demonstrated in bimodal cochlear implant users. In the current study, it was hypothesized that hearing aid (HA) u...

Adult-onset auditory deprivation following prolonged lack of amplification in the unaided ears of persons with bilaterally symmetrical sensorineural hearing impairment was first reported in 1984. This article on the phenomenon includes a review of the literature on adult-onset auditory deprivation in relation to etiology, pathophysiology, hearing-loss manifestations, typical audiologic profile,...

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception performance in spatially complex, lateralized listening scenarios and temporal fine-structure (TFS) coding at low frequencies. Young normal-hearing (NH) and two groups of elderly hearing-impaired (HI) listeners with mild or moderate hearing loss above 1.5 kHz participated in the study. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were est...

Enhancement techniques in binaural hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding for hearing impaired persons in reverberation and noise. Since reverberation and noise can be commonly modeled as diffuse sound fields, many state-of-theart techniques require an estimate of the diffuse power spectral density (PSD). In this paper we evaluate the performance of binaural dereverberation an...

Children who use bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) show significantly poorer sound localization skills than their normal hearing (NH) peers. This difference has been attributed, in part, to the fact that cochlear implants (CIs) do not faithfully transmit interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs), which are known to be important cues for sound localization. Int...

Spatially separating speech maskers from target speech often leads to a large intelligibility improvement. Modeling this phenomenon has long been of interest to binaural-hearing researchers for uncovering brain mechanisms and for improving signal-processing algorithms in hearing-assistive devices. Much of the previous binaural modeling work focused on the unmasking enabled by binaural cues at t...

For persons with moderate bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, binaural dichotic presentation of speech has helped in improving speech perception by reduction the effect of increased spectral and temporal masking. Speech processing schemes, which split the speech into two for binaural dichotic presentation, are evaluated on normal subjects with simulated hearing loss, and on hearing-impaired s...

With today's technology and the demonstrated success of cochlear implantation, along with expanded candidacy criteria, the opportunity to provide optimal hearing to both ears for individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss is greater than ever. This article reviews the advantages of binaural hearing and the disadvantages of hearing with only one ear or hearing with two ears with significan...

Fifty subjects with mild to moderate-severe sensorineural hearing loss and prior experience with binaural amplification were evaluated at two sites (25 subjects at each site). Signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were measured using the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) after each subject wore binaural in-the-ear hearing aids programmed for omnidirectional and dual-microphone performance, for 4 weeks. Both...

Although bilateral cochlear implantation has the potential to improve sound localization and speech understanding in noise, obstacles exist in presenting maximally useful binaural information to bilateral cochlear-implant (CI) users. One obstacle is that electrode arrays may differ in cochlear position by several millimeters, thereby stimulating different neural populations. Effects of interaur...