Auditory Attention and Spatial Unmasking in Children With Cochlear Implants

Area of Science:

• Auditory Neuroscience
• Speech Perception
• Cochlear Implants

Background:

• Children spend significant time in noisy environments, making speech-in-noise ability crucial.
• Normal-hearing children benefit from spatial unmasking for speech intelligibility.
• Children with bilateral cochlear implants (BiCIs) show limited benefit from spatial unmasking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if poor auditory attention abilities explain the lack of binaural unmasking in children with BiCIs.
• To determine the extent to which children with BiCIs can utilize binaural cues for speech understanding in noise.

Main Methods:

• Target and interferer speech stimuli were presented to BiCI participants' clinical processors.
• Stimuli were delivered to one or both ears to assess binaural unmasking.
• Speech reception thresholds were measured under different spatial configurations.

Main Results:

• Children with BiCIs showed improved speech reception thresholds when target and interferer were in opposite ears.
• No significant binaural unmasking was observed when the interferer was presented to both ears and the target to only one.
• Participants could ignore an interferer and attend to target speech even with extreme stimulus separation.

Conclusions:

• Children with BiCIs demonstrate an ability to selectively attend to target speech.
• The primary limitation appears to be poor encoding of binaural cues, not attention deficits.
• Findings suggest a need to improve binaural processing in bilateral cochlear implant technology for children.