HiRes with Fidelity 120 benefit in native speakers of Korean.

In HiRes 120 sound processing, the spectral bands are created by precisely varying the proportion of current delivered simultaneously to adjacent electrodes through active current steering. The purpose of this study was to examine performance of native Korean speakers with HiRes 120. Eleven adults with postlinguial hearing loss participated in the study. The difference between baseline and three-month HiRes 120 performance was significant for all tests (p < 0.05). For monosyllabic words, eight subjects obtained higher scores with HiRes 120. For the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT), ten subjects obtained higher scores with standard HiRes. These results show Korean speakers exhibit improved speech understanding in quiet and in noise with HiRes 120. All subjects preferred the new HiRes 120 sound processing option. Copyright 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.