Contralateral Interference Caused by Binaurally Presented Competing Speech in Adult Bilateral Cochlear-Implant Users

Abstract

Bilateral cochlear implantation should provide a hearing benefit to the recipient. For the BI-CI listeners specifically recruited for this study, there seems to be a conflict with processing the auditory information across the two ears, which produced the opposite of the desired hearing benefit. This suggests that there may be a subset of potential BI-CI users for whom contralateral interference offsets much of the potential head-shadow benefit. If so, earlier implantation in the second implanted ear might have produced larger binaural benefits, which is important information for clinicians advising patients considering bilateral implantation.