Precedence based speech segregation in bilateral cochlear implant users.

The precedence effect (PE) enables the perceptual dominance by a source (lead) over an echo (lag) in reverberant environments. In addition to facilitating sound localization, the PE can play an important role in spatial unmasking of speech. Listeners attending to binaural vocoder simulations with identical channel center frequencies and phase demonstrated PE-based benefits in a closed-set speech segregation task. When presented with the same stimuli, bilateral cochlear implant users did not derive such benefits. These findings suggest that envelope extraction in itself may not lead to a breakdown of the PE benefits, and that other factors may play a role.