Auditory Attention and Spatial Unmasking in Children With Cochlear Implants.
Sara M Misurelli, Matthew J Goupell, Emily A Burg and 3 others
PMID 32812515WHAT IT FOUND
Children with bilateral cochlear implants can ignore speech in the opposite ear as well as adults do, but gain no benefit when noise comes from both ears.
Longer delays between first and second implant correlate with greater difficulty ignoring noise in the first-implanted ear.
Key findings
01Children with bilateral cochlear implants showed a large improvement in speech reception thresholds when the interfering talker was moved from the same ear as the target to the opposite ear.
02On average, these children demonstrated only minimal binaural unmasking when the interferer was presented to both ears.
03There was a significant correlation between the asymmetry in selective auditory attention and the time between the first and second cochlear implant activations.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small (10 children), which limits the generalizability of the findings. The study used direct audio input rather than free-field testing, so results may not fully reflect how children listen in real-world classrooms. The lack of significant differences between children and adults may be due to the small number of participants in both groups rather than a true absence of developmental effects. The children had varying etiologies and implant histories, which introduces heterogeneity in the data.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with bilateral cochlear implants have normal binaural hearing capabilities. While they can attend to one ear to ignore noise in the other, they showed almost no benefit from binaural processing when noise was present in both ears, indicating a persistent deficit in spatial unmasking compared to normal-hearing peers.