Prior exposure to a reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility in adult cochlear implant listeners

Abstract

Objectives: The goal of this study is to investigate whether prior exposure to reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility of adult cochlear implant (CI) users.

Methods: Six adult CI users participated in this study. Speech intelligibility was measured in five different simulated reverberant listening environments with two different speech corpuses. Within each listening environment, prior exposure was varied by either having the same environment across all trials (blocked presentation) or having different environment from trial to trial (unblocked).

Results: Speech intelligibility decreased as reverberation time increased. Although substantial individual variability was observed, all CI listeners showed an increase in the blocked presentation condition as compared to the unblocked presentation condition for both speech corpuses.

Conclusion: Prior listening exposure to a reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility in adult CI listeners. Further research is required to understand the underlying mechanism of adaptation to listening environment.

Keywords:

• Cochlear implant
• Reverberation
• Speech intelligibility

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Hussnain Ali for his assistance in data collection.

Disclaimer statements

Contributors NS, designed and conducted the experiment, analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript; ET, designed the experiment and wrote the manuscript; PL, designed the experiment.

Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts-of-interest.

Ethics approval The use of human subjects was reviewed and approved by the University of Texas at Dallas Institution Review Board.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NIH-NIDCD Grants R01 DC010194 and R01 DC011828.