Realising the benefit of bilateral cochlear implants.

Existing data on the spatial unmasking from bilateral cochlear implants (BCIs) indicates that the benefit is at most a 4 dB improvement in speech reception threshold. We have developed a model of speech reception in noise which predicts SRTs for normally hearing listeners with great accuracy. The model also correctly predicts the benefit measured from existing BCI studies, but shows that benefits can be much larger (>10 dB) if different spatial configurations are examined, or if the listener adopts an optimal head orientation. Can these benefits be demonstrated in practice? Can listeners be trained to better exploit head orientation?
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