Bilaterally Combined Electric and Acoustic Hearing in Mandarin-Speaking Listeners: The Population With Poor Residual Hearing

ECU Author/Contributor (non-ECU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Duo-Duo,Liu,Ji-Sheng,Yang,Zhen-Dong,Wilson,Blake S.,Zhou,Ning Tao (Creator)

Institution

East Carolina University (ECU )

Web Site: http://www.ecu.edu/lib/

Abstract: The hearing loss criterion for cochlear implant candidacy in mainland China is extremely stringent (bilateral severe toprofound hearing loss), resulting in few patients with substantial residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear. The main objectiveof the current study was to examine the benefit of bimodal hearing in typical Mandarin-speaking implant users who havepoorer residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear relative to those used in the English-speaking studies. Seventeen Mandarinspeaking bimodal users with pure-tone averages of 80 dB HL participated in the study. Sentence recognition in quiet and innoise as well as tone and word recognition in quiet were measured in monaural and bilateral conditions. There was nosignificant bimodal effect for word and sentence recognition in quiet. Small bimodal effects were observed for sentencerecognition in noise (6%) and tone recognition (4%). The magnitude of both effects was correlated with unaided thresholds atfrequencies near voice fundamental frequencies (F0s). A weak correlation between the bimodal effect for word recognitionand unaided thresholds at frequencies higher than F0s was identified. These results were consistent with previous findingsthat showed more robust bimodal benefits for speech recognition tasks that require higher spectral resolution than speechrecognition in quiet. The significant but small F0-related bimodal benefit was also consistent with the limited acoustic hearingin the nonimplanted ear of the current subject sample, who are representative of the bimodal users in mainland China.These results advocate for a more relaxed implant candidacy criterion to be used in mainland China.

Additional Information

Publication

Other

Language: English

Date: 2018

Keywords

bimodal hearing, cochlear implants, Mandarin, acoustic residual hearing

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