The Roles of Selective Attention and Asymmetric Experience in Bilateral Speech Interference for Single-Sided Deafness Cochlear Implant and Vocoder Listeners

The association between bilateral speech interference and monaural speech recognition with different-F0 interferers for NH listeners suggests that (possibly age-related) non-spatial selective-attention ability might also explain SSD-CI interference variability. Regardless of hearing status, some people might have difficulty attending to one sound while ignoring others, with asymmetrically distorted inputs exacerbating this problem. Comparable SSD-CI and NH-Vocoder interference challenges the idea that SSD-CI interference reflects long-term maladaptive changes from asymmetric hearing. Future work should explore selective-attention measures as predictors of SSD-CI performance in competing-talker environments.