Speech recognition in complex environments involves focusing on the most relevantspeech signal while ignoring distractions. Difficulties can arise due to theincoming signal’s characteristics (e.g., accented pronunciation, backgroundnoise, distortion) or the listener’s characteristics (e.g., hearing loss,advancing age, cognitive abilities). Listeners who use cochlear implants (CIs)must overcome these difficulties while listening to an impoverished version ofthe signals available to listeners with normal hearing (NH). In the real world,listeners often attempt tasks concurrent with, but unrelated to, speechrecognition. This study sought to reveal the effects of visual distraction andperforming a simultaneous visual task on audiovisual speech recognition. Twogroups, those with CIs and those with NH listening to vocoded speech, werepresented videos of unaccented and accented talkers with and without visualdistractions, and with a secondary task. It was hypothesized that, compared withthose with NH, listeners with CIs would be less influenced by visual distractionor a secondary visual task because their prolonged reliance on visual cues toaid auditory perception improves the ability to suppress irrelevant information.Results showed that visual distractions alone did not significantly decreasespeech recognition performance for either group, but adding a secondary taskdid. Speech recognition was significantly poorer for accented compared withunaccented speech, and this difference was greater for CI listeners. Theseresults suggest that speech recognition performance is likely more dependent onincoming signal characteristics than a difference in adaptive strategies formanaging distractions between those who listen with and without a CI.
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