The purpose of this study was to
examine the effects of reverberation on the ability of listeners with bilateral
cochlear implants (BCIs) to localize speech in anechoic and reverberant
environments. Two specific research questions were addressed: how do listeners with BCIs localize sounds in different environments compared to listeners with normal hearing (NH)? And at what reverberation time (RT60) does localization
performance begin to decline for both groups of subjects? Six adults with BCIs
and ten with NH participated.
All subjects completed a virtual localization
test in simulated anechoic and reverberant environments (0.0, 0.2, 0.6, and 0.9
s RT60) in quiet. A three-word phrase was presented at 70 dBSPL from nine simulated source locations in the frontal-horizontal plane (± 900).
Root-mean-square localization error (RMSLE) in degrees was calculated. Results
revealed localization accuracy significantly decreased as reverberation time
increased for both groups of subjects. Listeners with BCIs had significantly
poorer localization accuracy than listeners with NH in all conditions.