Two Ears Are Not Always Better than One: Mandatory Vowel Fusion Across Spectrally Mismatched Ears in Hearing-Impaired Listeners.

ABSTRACT: Hearing loss and auditory prostheses can alter auditory processing by inducing large pitch mismatches and broad pitch fusion between the two ears. Similar to integration of incongruent inputs in other sensory modalities, the mismatched, fused pitches are often averaged across ears for simple stimuli. Here, we measured parallel effects on complex stimulus integration using a new technique based on vowel classification in five bilateral hearing aid users and eight bimodal cochlear implant users. Continua between five pairs of synthetic vowels were created by varying the first formant spectral peak while keeping the second formant constant. Comparison of binaural and monaural vowel classification functions for each vowel pair continuum enabled visualization of the following frequency-dependen

SUBMITTER: Reiss LA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4940290 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature