Why does a cochlear implant user often struggle to discriminate between consonant sounds like 'pa' and 'ba' compared to vowels?

💡 Explanation

Cochlear implants encode sound through electrical stimulation, therefore the fine-grained temporal cues crucial for distinguishing consonants such as 'pa' and 'ba', which rely on voice onset time, are degraded. This happens because electrical stimulation lacks the precision of natural cochlear mechanics, rather than issues with vowel processing.

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