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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Childhood hearing impairment: auditory and linguistic interactions during multidimensional speech processing
S Jerger1, R Martin, D A Pearson
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Communicative Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.
Journal of Speech and Hearing Research
|August 1, 1995
Summary
Children with hearing impairments process speech differently, showing less interference from talker gender but more from word meaning. This suggests underdeveloped linguistic processing in children with hearing loss.
Area of Science:
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Speech Perception
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Children with mild-to-severe hearing loss rely on hearing aids and spoken language.
- Limited understanding exists regarding how these children process speech.
- Investigating speech processing in hearing-impaired children is crucial for communication development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine how children with mild-to-severe hearing impairments process multidimensional speech information.
- To compare speech processing in children with and without hearing impairments.
Main Methods:
- A speeded selective-attention task (Garner task) was employed.
- Participants selectively attended to either the talker's gender (auditory) or the word spoken (linguistic), while ignoring the other dimension.
- Garner interference was measured to assess independent processing of speech dimensions.
Main Results:
- Both groups exhibited Garner interference, indicating non-independent speech dimension processing.
- Children with hearing impairments showed normal interference when ignoring talker gender but reduced interference when ignoring word meaning.
- This suggests the auditory dimension is normally distracting, while the linguistic dimension is less so.
Conclusions:
- Speech dimensions are not processed independently in children with hearing impairments.
- Hearing impairment is associated with an underdeveloped strength of processing for linguistic speech dimensions.
- This impacts how children with hearing loss attend to and process auditory and linguistic speech information.
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