In normal-hearing listeners, localization of auditory speech involves stimulus processing in the postero-dorsal pathway of the auditory system. In quiet environments, bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users show high speech recognition performance, but localization of auditory speech is poor, especially when discriminating stimuli from the same hemifield. Whether this difficulty relates to the in...

This paper evaluates speech enhancement in binaural multimicrophone hearing aids by noise reduction algorithms based on the multichannel Wiener filter (MWF) and the MWF with partial noise estimate (MWF-N). Both algorithms are specifically developed to combine noise reduction with the preservation of binaural cues. Objective and perceptual evaluations were performed with different speech-in-mult...

Bilateral cochlear implantation attempts to increase performance over a monaural prosthesis by harnessing the binaural processing of the auditory system. Although many bilaterally implanted human subjects discriminate interaural time differences (ITDs), a major cue for sound localization and signal detection in noise, their performance is typically poorer than that of normal-hearing listeners. ...

OBJECTIVE This study examined speech recognition in noise for children with hearing loss, compared it to recognition for children with normal hearing, and examined mechanisms that might explain variance in children's abilities to recognize speech in noise. DESIGN Word recognition was measured in two levels of noise, both when the speech and noise were co-located in front and when the noise ca...

OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of binaural dichotic presentation using comb filters with complementary magnitude responses, based on fixed bandwidth and auditory critical bandwidth, in improving speech perception by persons with moderate bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, and to assess its effect on localization of the sound source. DESIGN AND STUDY ...

Sentence and text comprehension is known to be difficult for orally-trained individuals with hearing impairment. This study explored the comprehension of several syntactic structures that are especially difficult for them, and may lead to considerable comprehension difficulties. Ten structures derived by Wh-movement were tested, some of them for the first time in hearing-impairment: 5 types of ...

Bilateral cochlear implant (BiCI) users gain an advantage in noisy situations from a second implant, but their bilateral performance falls short of normal hearing listeners. Channel interactions due to overlapping electrical fields between electrodes can impair speech perception, but its role in limiting binaural hearing performance has not been well characterized. To address the issue, binaura...

Spatial release from masking (SRM) was measured in groups of children with bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs, average ages 6.0 and 7.9 yr) and with normal hearing (NH, average ages 5.0 and 7.8 yr). Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for target speech in front (0°), and interferers in front, distributed asymmetrically toward the right (+90°/+90°) or distributed symmetrically towar...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether an auditory-deprivation/dominant-ear effect associated with nonalternating monaural amplification is present in children. Subjects were 35 children with bilateral symmetric, moderately severe to profound, sensorineural hearing impairment. Seventeen were fitted with nonalternating monaural amplification and 18 were fitted with binaural o...

Conductive hearing loss, produced by otitis media with effusion, is widespread in young children. However, little is known about its short- or long-term effects on hearing or the brain. To study the consequences of a conductive loss for the perception and processing of sounds, we plugged the left ear canal of ferrets for 7-15 months during either infancy or adulthood. Before or during plugging,...