AUDITORY PROCESSING IN HEARING IMPAIRED CHILDREN

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Hearing-impaired children with mild/severe sensorineural hearing losses typically use aural/oral language as their primary mode of communication. Processing spoken language in the presence of childhood hearing impairment, however, may be characterized by important differences due to impoverished and degraded auditory-sensory input. The long-term broad objective of this on-going research program is to provide a better understanding of how childhood hearing impairments affects multidimensional speech processing. Results of our previous funding period, based on auditory Stroop and Garner interference effects, suggested that childhood hearing impairment alters the processing interaction between the auditory and linguistic dimensions of speech. The presence of childhood hearing impairment seemed to induce a bias favoring the auditory dimension of speech. The findings of some previous investigators have suggested that the encoding of the auditory and linguistic dimensions involves qualitatively different perceptual mechanisms. This proposal raises the speculation that childhood hearing impairment may affect the development of these different types of hypothesized perceptual mechanisms, seemingly altering the linguistic encoding mechanisms, but not the auditory encoding mechanism. The proposed studies follow logically from these results, determining the processing dependents in speech perception as a function of the nature of the information to be processed. The overall pattern of results will allow us to define the characteristics of the signal that yield a particular dependency relation. Determining the processing dependencies in speech perception should explicate the operating properties of the system, which should serve to refine theoretical understanding of speech perception by hearing-impaired listeners. Overall results will also provide an important foundation for developing and evaluating remediation programs for improving communication skills in children with hearing impair nt.