Sensorineural hearing loss impairs binaural cue use more than basic audibility

Evidence

It is evident from this review of literature that listeners with sensorineural hearing loss experience substantial deficits in their abilities to take advantage of binaural cues. Listeners with symmetrical hearing loss will experience poor sound localization as well as difficulty in using their binaural hearing to separate target sounds from background sounds. Listeners with asymmetric hearing loss experience even greater difficulties. As a result, the ability of many listeners with hearing loss to utilize their two ears is severely compromised, and they cannot benefit from the multitude of abilities afforded by hearing with two ears. Amplification would not be expected to restore poor sound localization due to abnormal encoding of binaural information, but it could help with the representation of ILDs. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1592

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to amplification/compression tradeoffs; the reader’s interest in how hearing aids interact with binaural perception. Also connects to the author’s Chapter 8 discussion of nonlinear amplification distorting acoustic cues.

Related

• Amplification cannot restore sound localization impaired by binaural encoding loss. (similarity 0.92)
• Independent compression in each ear distorts binaural localization cues (similarity 0.90)
• Hearing-impaired listeners gain far less binaural-squelch advantage than normal hearers (similarity 0.89)
• Hearing-impaired listeners vary widely in binaural deficit severity (similarity 0.89)
• Sensorineural hearing loss causes wide variability in sound localization ability (similarity 0.88)
• Even small hearing asymmetries across ears disrupt binaural hearing. (similarity 0.87)
• Hearing aids cannot restore sound localization because coding damage, not audibility, is the cause (similarity 0.86)
• Binaural hearing aid processing preserves spatial cues that monaural processing distorts (similarity 0.86)
• Hearing-impaired listeners benefit roughly two-thirds less from binaural squelch than normal-hearing listeners. (similarity 0.85)
• Compression hearing aids distort spectral temporal and binaural cues in poorly understood ways (similarity 0.85)
• Hearing aids often worsen rather than improve sound localization. (similarity 0.85)
• Head shadow makes high-frequency binaural cues inaudible in sloping hearing loss (similarity 0.85)
• Restoring audibility does not restore sound localization in hearing loss (similarity 0.84)
• Hearing aids fail to restore sound localization in many listeners (similarity 0.84)
• Amplification only compensates for elevated thresholds, not other perceptual deficits from hearing loss. (similarity 0.83)