Cochlear implants give good speech recognition in quiet but poor performance in noise

Evidence

Cochlear implants (CIs) can restore the sense of hearing in profound deafened adults and children. CI signal processing strategies have been developed for speech understanding in quiet, such that many post-lingually deafened adults with CIs can recognize 60–80 % of sentences presented in quiet (Friesen et al. 2001 ). However, speech intelligibility in noise and music perception, although very variable, remain generally poor for CI listeners. For example it is still challenging for many CI users to discriminate vowels and phonemes in a closed set identification task without background noise (Sagi et al. 2010 ; Svirsky et al. 2011 ). These difficulties might be produced by the limited spectral resolution delivered by CI devices. Spectral resolution may be degraded by the broad electrical fields created in the cochlea when the electrodes are stimulated. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1823

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the auditory background the whole chapter’s normative-mechanism question builds on.