Sensorineural hearing loss caused by cochlear damage impacts differentially the auditory processing of temporal-envelope and temporal fine-structure information. Our work suggests that cochlear damage preserves and even enhances the auditory detection of temporal-envelope cues whereas it degrades the detection of temporal fine-structure cues. The enhancement of temporal-envelope cues is consequent to the loss of the active mechanism in the cochlea and maybe abnormal short-term neural adaptation in the auditory nerve. The reasons for the reduced ability to detect temporal fine-structure cues are still unknown. Additional work suggests that cochlear damage spares short-term auditory memory and decision mechanisms involved in temporal-envelope and temporal fine-structure processing. However, we found that cochlear damage is associated with increased internal noise (that is, reduced “processing efficiency”) for temporal-envelope processing. We still investigate to which extent the impoverished ability to understand speech in the presence of background sounds (such as competing voices) typically associated with sensorineural hearing loss is related to the differential impact of cochlear damage on temporal-envelope and fine-structure processing.