Prior exposure to a reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility in adult cochlear implant listeners.

Objectives: The goal of this study is to investigate whether prior exposure to reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility of adult cochlear implant (CI) users.
Methods: Six adult CI users participated in this study. Speech intelligibility was measured in five different simulated reverberant listening environments with two different speech corpuses. Within each listening environment, prior exposure was varied by either having the same environment across all trials (blocked presentation) or having different environment from trial to trial (unblocked).
Results: Speech intelligibility decreased as reverberation time increased. Although substantial individual variability was observed, all CI listeners showed an increase in the blocked presentation condition as compared to the unblocked presentation condition for both speech corpuses.
Conclusion: Prior listening exposure to a reverberant listening environment improves speech intelligibility in adult CI listeners. Further research is required to understand the underlying mechanism of adaptation to listening environment.