1 Department of Ear, Nose, and Throat, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
2 Departments of Surgery, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Trends Hear. 2018 Jan-Dec;22:2331216518757892. doi: 10.1177/2331216518757892.
The hearing loss criterion for cochlear implant candidacy in mainland China is extremely stringent (bilateral severe to profound hearing loss), resulting in few patients with substantial residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear. The main objective of the current study was to examine the benefit of bimodal hearing in typical Mandarin-speaking implant users who have poorer residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear relative to those used in the English-speaking studies. Seventeen Mandarin-speaking bimodal users with pure-tone averages of ∼80 dB HL participated in the study. Sentence recognition in quiet and in noise as well as tone and word recognition in quiet were measured in monaural and bilateral conditions. There was no significant bimodal effect for word and sentence recognition in quiet. Small bimodal effects were observed for sentence recognition in noise (6%) and tone recognition (4%). The magnitude of both effects was correlated with unaided thresholds at frequencies near voice fundamental frequencies (F0s). A weak correlation between the bimodal effect for word recognition and unaided thresholds at frequencies higher than F0s was identified. These results were consistent with previous findings that showed more robust bimodal benefits for speech recognition tasks that require higher spectral resolution than speech recognition in quiet. The significant but small F0-related bimodal benefit was also consistent with the limited acoustic hearing in the nonimplanted ear of the current subject sample, who are representative of the bimodal users in mainland China. These results advocate for a more relaxed implant candidacy criterion to be used in mainland China.
中国大陆人工耳蜗植入候选者的听力损失标准非常严格（双侧重度至极重度听力损失），导致非植入耳中有大量残余听力的患者较少。本研究的主要目的是研究在非植入耳中残留听力比英语研究中使用的听力更差的典型普通话使用者双模式听力的益处。17 名纯音平均听阈约为 80 dB HL 的普通话双模式使用者参与了这项研究。在单耳和双耳条件下测量了安静和噪声中的句子识别，以及安静中的音调和单词识别。在安静中，单词和句子识别没有明显的双模式效果。在噪声中的句子识别（6%）和音调识别（4%）中观察到较小的双模式效果。这两种效果的幅度与接近语音基频（F0）的未助听阈值相关。识别单词的双模式效果与高于 F0 的频率的未助听阈值之间存在微弱的相关性。这些结果与先前的研究结果一致，这些研究结果表明，对于需要比安静中语音识别更高的频谱分辨率的语音识别任务，双模式具有更强的益处。与当前受试者样本的非植入耳中的有限听觉一致，与 F0 相关的双模式益处具有显著但较小的相关性，当前受试者样本代表了中国大陆的双模式使用者。这些结果提倡在中国大陆使用更宽松的植入候选标准。
