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Auditory perceived continuity in cochlear implant listeners

University of British Columbia

Cochlear implants are generally considered the most successful of all sensory neural prostheses currently in use (Wilson and Dorman, 2008). Investigation of auditory perception with cochlear implants is important for developing effective and evidence-based approaches for intervention and management of profound hearing loss. Various phenomena of auditory perception have begun to be explored with cochlear implant users. However, perception of a phenomenon that allows listeners to perceptually restore the continuity of sounds that are partially masked or interrupted by other sounds (“auditory induction” or “auditory continuity”) has not yet been investigated in a group of listeners with cochlear implants. In the current study a group of 10 listeners with cochlear implants and 10 control listeners with normal-hearing provided judgments on the continuity of a pure tone signal in the presence of four levels of a narrow-band noise masker. The group of listeners with cochlear implants reported perception of auditory continuity, but did so for lower levels of the masker when compared to the normal-hearing control group. A secondary experiment investigated simultaneous masking in listeners with cochlear implants using the same masker levels used in the continuity experiment. The cochlear implant group displayed effective masking at a lower level than the normal-hearing control group, the same level at which auditory continuity was perceived in the first experiment. The differences observed between the two groups may be attributable to the greater effects of masking resulting from poorer frequency resolution, lack of temporal fine structure information and reduced dynamic range for users of cochlear implants compared with listeners with normal-hearing.

Text

2012-10-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43420

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/