Interaural speech asymmetry predicts bilateral speech intelligibility but not listening effort in adults with bilateral cochlear implants

• DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.1038856
• Publication Date: 2022-12-07T07:04:15Z
• Authors: Emily A. Burg; Tanvi D. Thakkar; Ruth Y. Litovsky
• Keywords: Intelligibility (philosophy)

Bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) can facilitate improved speech intelligibility in noise and sound localization abilities compared to a unilateral implant individuals with bilateral severe profound hearing loss. Still, many BiCIs do not benefit from binaural the same extent that normal (NH) listeners do. For example, redundancy, derived having access duplicate copies of signal, is highly variable among BiCI users. Additionally, patients loss commonly report elevated listening effort NH listeners. There some evidence suggest may reduce CI, but limited existing literature has shown this consistently. Critically, no studies date have investigated question using pupillometry quantify effort, where large pupil sizes indicate high small low effort. Thus, present study aimed build on by investigating potential benefits for both Twelve adults were tested three conditions: Better Ear, Poorer Bilateral. Stimuli IEEE sentences presented loudspeaker at 0° azimuth quiet. Participants asked repeat back sentences, responses scored an experimenter while changes dilation measured. On average, participants demonstrated similar Ear conditions, significantly worse condition. Despite was larger These results users did demonstrate redundancy The interaural asymmetries precluded them obtaining as inverse relationship between two variables. Further, obtain release when ears versus their better ear only. Instead, elicited increased listening, which be due poor integration asymmetric inputs.