Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks

Mengchao Zhang; Christine Du Plessis

doi:10.1121/10.0039099

Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks

Mengchao Zhang^*
, Christine Du Plessis

^*Corresponding author for this work

Audiology Department School of Life and Health Sciences , Aston University, Aston Triangle , Birmingham , UK.

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Abstract

The current study simulated bilateral and unilateral cochlear implant (CI) processing using a channel vocoder with dense tonal carriers (“SPIRAL”) in 13 normal-hearing listeners. Their performance of recognizing spatial speech-in-noise was measured under the effects of three masker locations (0°, +90°, and −90°; target at 0°) and three types of maskers (steady-state noise, speech-modulated noise, and a single-talker interferer) where the maskers contained different levels of energetic and informational masking. The stimuli were spatialized using the head-related impulse responses recorded from behind-the-ear microphones of hearing aids. The results showed that simulated users of bilateral CIs displayed binaural benefits (i.e., binaural summation and binaural squelch) in the maskers with pure energetic masking or with additional modulation masking but not in the masker with primarily language-based informational masking. Binaural benefits observed in the simulation did not consistently agree with the findings in real CI users. The use of SPIRAL vocoder allows further parameterization research into pinning down the factors that affect binaural benefits in bilateral CIs.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1653-1662
Number of pages	10
Journal	Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume	158
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039099
Publication status	Published - 2 Sept 2025

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2025 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in:
Mengchao Zhang, Christine du Plessis; Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 September 2025; 158 (3): 1653–1662.
and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039099

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10.1121/10.0039099

Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks
Copyright © 2025 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in: Mengchao Zhang, Christine du Plessis; Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 September 2025; 158 (3): 1653–1662. and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039099
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Cite this

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abstract = "The current study simulated bilateral and unilateral cochlear implant (CI) processing using a channel vocoder with dense tonal carriers (“SPIRAL”) in 13 normal-hearing listeners. Their performance of recognizing spatial speech-in-noise was measured under the effects of three masker locations (0°, +90°, and −90°; target at 0°) and three types of maskers (steady-state noise, speech-modulated noise, and a single-talker interferer) where the maskers contained different levels of energetic and informational masking. The stimuli were spatialized using the head-related impulse responses recorded from behind-the-ear microphones of hearing aids. The results showed that simulated users of bilateral CIs displayed binaural benefits (i.e., binaural summation and binaural squelch) in the maskers with pure energetic masking or with additional modulation masking but not in the masker with primarily language-based informational masking. Binaural benefits observed in the simulation did not consistently agree with the findings in real CI users. The use of SPIRAL vocoder allows further parameterization research into pinning down the factors that affect binaural benefits in bilateral CIs.",

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Simulation of unilateral and bilateral cochlear implants on spatial speech-in-noise tasks

Abstract

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