Sentence recognition in noise promoting or suppressing masking release by normal-hearing and cochlear-implant listeners

Normal-hearing (NH) listeners maintain robust speech understanding in modulated noise by "glimpsing" portions of speech from a partially masked waveform--a phenomenon known as masking release (MR). Cochlear implant (CI) users, however, generally lack such resiliency. In previous studies, temporal masking of speech by noise occurred randomly, obscuring to what degree MR is attributable to the temporal overlap of speech and masker. In the present study, masker conditions were constructed to either promote (+MR) or suppress (-MR) masking release by controlling the degree of temporal overlap. Sentence recognition was measured in 14 CI subjects and 22 young-adult NH subjects. Normal-hearing subjects showed large amounts of masking release in the +MR condition and a marked difference between +MR and -MR conditions. In contrast, CI subjects demonstrated less effect of MR overall, and some displayed modulation interference as reflected by poorer performance in modulated maskers. These results suggest that the poor performance of typical CI users in noise might be accounted for by factors that extend beyond peripheral masking, such as reduced segmental boundaries between syllables or words. Encouragingly, the best CI users tested here could take advantage of masker fluctuations to better segregate the speech from the background.