The primary purpose of the proposed research is to develop, validate, implement, and norm a practical binaural assessment protocol that can be used clinically with bilateral cochlear implant patients. The protocol will be implemented in a computerized instrument to be developed in the course of the project. Binaural assessment of a cochlear implant patient will be performed by directly connecting the instrument's two channel outputs to the auxiliary inputs of the patient's two speech processors. The computerized instrument will preprocess the two-channel outputs to create binaurally appropriate test signals for each type of binaural assessment. The instrument will be designed to interface with any type of cochlear implant processor and will utilize novel digital signal processing techniques to create the test signals.
