The benefits of combining acoustic and electric stimulation for the recognition of speech, voice and melodies.
Fifteen patients fit with a cochlear implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the other ear were presented with tests of speech and melody recognition and voice discrimination under conditions of electric (E) stimulation, acoustic (A) stimulation and combined electric and acoustic stimulation (EAS). When acoustic information was added to electrically stimulated information performance increased by 17-23 percentage points on tests of word and sentence recognition in quiet and sentence recognition in noise. On average, the EAS patients achieved higher scores on CNC words than patients fit with a unilateral cochlear implant. While the best EAS patients did not outperform the best patients fit with a unilateral cochlear implant, proportionally more EAS patients achieved very high scores on tests of speech recognition than unilateral cochlear implant patients.
Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-0102, USA. mdorman@asu.edu
Michael F
MF
Dorman
Rene H
RH
Gifford
Anthony J
AJ
Spahr
Sharon A
SA
McKarns
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology; D019929:Cochlear Implantation; D004558:Electric Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D014833:Voice Quality