Bilateral cochlear-implant (CI) users struggle to understand speech in noisy environments despite receiving some spatial-hearing benefits. One potential solution is to provide acoustic beamforming. A headphone-based experiment was conducted to compare speech understanding under natural CI listening conditions and for two non-adaptive beamformers, one single beam and one binaural, called “triple beam,” which provides an improved signal-to-noise ratio (beamforming benefit) and usable spatial cues by reintroducing interaural level differences. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for speech-on-speech masking were measured with target speech presented in front and two maskers in co-located or narrow/wide separations. Numerosity judgments and sound-localization performance also were measured. Natural spatial cues, single-beam, and triple-beam conditions were compared. For CI listeners, there was a negligible change in SRTs when comparing co-located to separated maskers for natural listening conditions. In contrast, there were 4.9- and 16.9-dB improvements in SRTs for the beamformer and 3.5- and 12.3-dB improvements for triple beam (narrow and wide separations). Similar results were found for normal-hearing listeners presented with vocoded stimuli. Single beam improved speech-on-speech masking performance but yielded poor sound localization. Triple beam improved speech-on-speech masking performance, albeit less than the single beam, and sound localization. Thus, triple beam was the most versatile across multiple spatial-hearing domains.

中文翻译：

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在双侧人工耳蜗用户的语音掩蔽和声音定位期间三重声学波束成形的好处

尽管获得了一些空间听力优势，但双侧人工耳蜗 (CI) 用户仍难以理解嘈杂环境中的语音。一种可能的解决方案是提供声波波束形成。进行了基于耳机的实验，以比较自然 CI 聆听条件下的语音理解，以及两个非自适应波束形成器，一个单波束和一个双耳，称为“三波束”，它提供了改进的信噪比（波束形成优势)和通过重新引入耳间水平差异来提供可用的空间线索。用于语音掩蔽的语音接收阈值 (SRT) 是通过在前面呈现的目标语音和位于同一位置或窄/宽分离中的两个掩蔽器来测量的。还测量了数量判断和声音定位性能。比较了自然空间线索、单光束和三光束条件。对于 CI 听众来说，在自然收听条件下，将位于同一位置的掩蔽器与分开的掩蔽器进行比较时，SRT 的变化可以忽略不计。相比之下，波束形成器的 SRT 分别提高了 4.9 和 16.9 dB，三波束（窄和宽分离）分别提高了 3.5 和 12.3 dB。对于具有声码刺激的听力正常的听众，也发现了类似的结果。单波束提高了语音对语音的掩蔽性能，但产生了较差的声音定位。三波束改进了语音对语音的掩蔽性能，尽管低于单波束和声音定位。因此，三重波束在多个空间听觉领域中是最通用的。