Bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant listeners can segregate competing speech using talker sex cues, but not spatial cues.

Cochlear implant (CI) users have greater difficulty perceiving talker sex and spatial cues than do normal-hearing (NH) listeners. The present study measured recognition of target sentences in the presence of two co-located or spatially separated speech maskers in NH, bilateral CI, and bimodal CI listeners; masker sex was the same as or different than the target. NH listeners demonstrated a large masking release with masker sex and/or spatial cues. For CI listeners, significant masking release was observed with masker sex cues, but not with spatial cues, at least for the spatially symmetrically placed maskers and listening task used in this study.