The benefits of combining acoustic and electric stimulation for the recognition of speech, voice and melodies

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Fifteen patients fit with a cochlear implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the other ear were presented with tests of speech and melody recognition and voice discrimination under conditions of electric (E) stimulation, acoustic (A) stimulation and combined electric and acoustic stimulation (EAS). When acoustic information was added to electrically stimulated information performance increased by 17-23 percentage points on tests of word and sentence recognition in quiet and sentence recognition in noise. On average, the EAS patients achieved higher scores on CNC words than patients fit with a unilateral cochlear implant. While the best EAS patients did not outperform the best patients fit with a unilateral cochlear implant, proportionally more EAS patients achieved very high scores on tests of speech recognition than unilateral cochlear implant patients.

Medical Subject Headings

Acoustic Stimulation (methods); Auditory Threshold (physiology); Cochlear Implantation; Electric Stimulation (methods); Hearing Aids; Hearing Loss, Sensorineural (diagnosis, rehabilitation); Humans; Music; Recognition, Psychology; Speech Discrimination Tests; Speech Perception; Voice Quality

Publication Date

1-1-2008

Publication Title

Audiology & neuro-otology

E-ISSN

1421-9700

Volume

13

Issue

2

First Page

105

Last Page

12

PubMed ID

18057874

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1159/000111782

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