Sarah F. Poissant, Ph.D.
Communication Disorders Department
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Cochlear implants (CIs) have helped many recipients with profound hearing losses to live, learn and work successfully in mainstream environments. Despite their successes, however, many CI users complain that they encounter significant difficulties hearing and functioning in noisy, reverberant settings. Previous cochlear implant speech perception research has focused on hearing in sound-treated environments with little reverberation. This presentation will provide results of a number of experiments that examine the singular and combined effects of reverberation and masking (SSN and real-speech) on speech perception when varying numbers of spectral channels of information are available. The results are striking, lead to additional questions regarding the effects of real-speech maskers, and shed much needed light on the potential ability of cochlear implant users to function auditorily in naturalistic environments. (Work funded by NIH, 1 R03 DC 007969-01.)