Turn an Ear to Hear: How Hearing-Impaired Listeners Can Exploit Head Orientation to Enhance Their Speech Intelligibility in Noisy Social Settings.

Experiment 1 had a small sample, and one cochlear implant user was excluded. The subjective threshold was based on the last words the listener recalled, not on a standard adaptive threshold. Head orientation was measured from video with an accuracy of ±5°. Experiment 2 did not test real bilateral cochlear implant users; it used a vocoder simulation in normal-hearing listeners. The hearing-impaired group had typical age-related high-frequency loss, and the paper gives a different count for hearing-impaired participants in the figure note (15) than in the participant section (14). The restaurant was a simulation, not a real social setting. The surveys were self-report, created before the head-orientation findings were published, and the professional sample was 37, with only 31 reporting advice. The web review was not systematic, used Google, was limited to the first 10 pages per search, and was done by one reviewer. The paper did not test a clinical training programme or real-world communication outcomes.

Funded by Oticon Fonden and Action on Hearing Loss. The supplied text gives no additional conflict-of-interest declaration.

Do not conclude that telling cochlear implant users to turn their heads away from the talker has proven clinical benefit. The improvement was measured in laboratory speech-in-noise clips and a virtual restaurant, and the cochlear implant benefit in Experiment 2 came from simulation rather than real bilateral implant users.