Standard audio headphones are useful in many applications, but they cover the ears of the listener and thus may impair the perception of ambient sounds. Bone-conduction headphones offer a possible alternative, but traditionally their use has been limited to monaural applications due to the high propagation speed of sound in the human skull. Here we show that stereo bone-conduction headsets can be used to provide a limited amount of interaural isolation in a dichotic speech perception task. The results suggest that reliable spatial separation is possible with bone-conduction headsets, but that they probably cannot be used to lateralize signals to extreme left or right apparent locations
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