Article
The effect of interaural timing and place of stimulation mismatches on sound localization and spatial release from masking in normal-hearing and bimodal listeners (de)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Previous work has shown that the sound localization ability of bimodal listeners provided with a cochlear implant and a hearing aid can be improved when the constant interaural time delay (timing mismatch - TM) is reduced. The TM is caused by differences in processing delays of the hearing devices and differences in stimulation sites. When it comes to spatial release from masking (SRM), our own measurements have shown that the temporal alignment of the ear signals is also relevant for speech understanding in noise, when speech and noise sources are not co-located. SRM is as large as 8-9 dB in NH listeners without a temporal mismatch. As soon as a TM is introduced, SRM decreases. At 7 ms (typical TM of bimodal listeners) about 4 dB remain. in contrast, our recent findings in bimodal listeners show that SRM is small but not affected by TM. The reasons for the missing influence of TM on SRM in bimodal listeners as well as the effect of an interaural place of stimulation mismatch (PM) and interactions of TM and PM in computational models as well as in experiments will be presented.