How well can CI users understand speech in different situations

What is it about?

Speech understanding of CI users is mostly evaluated in stationary background noise. In such tests speech understanding scores are often surprisingly well. We wanted to know, how the same CI users perform when the background noise is fluctuating in time compared to non-fluctuating stationary background noise. Normal-hearing listeners are able to listen into the dips of fluctuating noise and extract glimpses of speech during those short dips which facilitates speech understanding especially when the background noise is loud compared to the target speech. As it turned out, even the best performing CI users couldn't make use of the dips.

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Why is it important?

This work explains why even very good performing CI users often report difficulties in complex listing situations e.g. in a cafeteria or in a restaurant.