gms | German Medical Science

Since the semantic information is also expressed by pitch contour in Mandarin, the primary goal of this study was to investigate possible differences in speech reception thresholds (SRT) and spatial release from masking (SRM) between Mandarin-Chinese-speaking (CMNS) and German-speaking (GS) normal-hearing (NH) listeners in different reverberant environments. Furthermore, it is not clear whether CMNS cochlear implant (CI) listeners perform worse than western CI listeners in reverberant environments if the CI coding strategy only delivers envelope information. Thus, the secondary goal of this study was to investigate possible differences in SRT and SRM between CMNS and GS listeners in different reverberant environments with vocoded test materials. Binaural SRTs were obtained from native CMNS and GS listeners with and without vocoder processing, using the corresponding Mandarin matrix test and German matrix test, in three different rooms (anechoic, reverberation time of 0.6s and 3s). SRTs were tested by using virtual acoustics and headphone presentation in a sound attenuated booth with the target speech from the front, while the maskers (SSN: stationary noise, or IFFM: International female fluctuating masker) were either co-located with the target, or spatially separated at ±60°. In general, for the non-vocoded tests, there were significant better SRTs in the CMNS group than in the GS group; however GS listeners showed significant larger SRM than the CMNS listeners for IFFM in both anechoic and low reverberant rooms. Reverberation had larger effect on the SRTs for CMNS listeners than for GS listeners for the co-located IFFM; however, its effect on the SRM was larger in GS listeners than in CMNS listeners. For the vocoded tests, there were no significant differences in SRTs and SRM between the two groups, except for the anechoic room, where CMNS listeners showed better SRTs in most conditions and larger SRM (with SSN) than the GS listeners.