Auditory training strategies for adult users of cochlear implants
Abstract
There has been growing interest recently in whether computer-based training can improve speech perception among users of cochlear implants (Fu et al., 2005; Oba et al., 2011; Ingvalson et al., 2013). This paper reports a series of experiments which first evaluated the effectiveness of different training strategies with normal-hearing participants who listened to noise-vocoded speech, before conducting a small-scale study with users of cochlear implants. Our vocoder studies revealed (1) that ‘High-Variability’ training led to greater generalisation to new talkers than training with a single talker, and (2) that word- and sentence-based training materials led to greater improvements than an approach based on phonemes in nonsense syllables. Informed by these findings, we evaluated the effectiveness of a computer-based training package that included word- and sentence-based tasks, with materials recorded by 20 talkers. We found good compliance with the training protocol, with 8 out of the 11 participants completing 15 hours of training as instructed. Following training, there was a significant improvement on a consonant test, but in general the improvements were small, highly variable, and not statistically significant. A large-scale randomised controlled trial is needed before we can be confident that computer-based auditory training is worthwhile for users of cochlear implants.
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