Deactivating cochlear implant electrodes harms spectral ripple resolution but spares speech perception

Evidence

Non-parametric statistics (Wilcoxon) were used due to the small number of participants (N = 13) and the CCRM and SMRT data exceeded acceptable limits for skewness and kurtosis. Each mapping condition was tested on two occasions and the highest score was used in the analysis. … For CAPT, CCRM in speech-shaped noise and babble there were no significant differences between any of the mapping options at the p < 0.05 level. However, the SMRT was significantly poorer for the indiscriminable electrodes deactivated than the clinical map (z = ‑2.9, p = 0.004) and also significantly poorer when the discriminable electrodes were de-activated (z = ‑2.62, p = 0.009). There was no significant difference between the de-activation of the indiscriminable or discriminable electrodes. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 2102

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme that speech understanding in implants survives degraded spectral detail while fine spectral/temporal tasks suffer — a contrast relevant to psychoacoustic reading on spectral resolution vs. speech intelligibility.