Simulation of a cochlear implant device diminishes the electrophysiological auditory orienting reaction to speech

Cochlear implants (CIs) have made remarkable progress to recover a large range of auditory functions after profound sensorineural hearing loss. The speech processor of an CI assimilates auditory input with different speech encoding strategies and has a strong impact on speech intelligibility. As prototyping new speech encoding strategies is time-consuming, the aim of our study was to evaluate an electrophysiological measure of auditory change detection in a virtual cochlear implant device for further preclinical testing of speech processing strategies in normal hearing subjects. Besides pitch discrimination we t…