Assessing Auditory Capacity in Hearing-Impaired Children

描述(由申请人提供)：早发性听力损失会对发育中的儿童造成沟通和心理社会发展的相应延迟。热量损失对幼儿的一个直接和明显的影响是语言感知和产生的缺陷。虽然标准化的听力测量程序能够描述听力损失的存在和程度，但基本上没有临床测量方法来评估婴儿在成长过程中的言语感知能力。无法评估婴儿和幼儿的这些技能可能会导致做出关于干预的错误决定。拟议的调查重点是听力-知觉的发展和幼儿听力受损儿童口语的出现。实现这一目标的手段需要开发和改进新的行为评估工具，以测量6个月至5岁儿童的言语感知。使用该测试组合进行的纵向和横断面研究将针对以下四个具体目标：1)确定评估任务对听觉言语知觉测量的受试者之间和受试者内的变异性的影响程度；2)测量听觉言语知觉表现随时间的变化，作为年龄、评估任务、听觉状态和感觉辅助的函数；3)调查语言识别与语言/认知变量之间的关系。描述和测量母亲参与对听障儿童语言和言语感知任务表现的贡献，并验证父母报告作为评估这一群体语言发展的工具的有效性。在阐述这项为期五年的调查的目标时，将界定听力因素及其相互关系，这些因素是发展年幼听障儿童口语能力的基础。将使用各种任务来测量和跟踪听力正常和听力受损儿童的听觉-知觉发展。研究结果将被分析，以解释听觉知觉发展，并根据多个贡献变量及其相互作用建立模型。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Early onset hearing loss can impose consequential delays in communication and psychosocial development on the developing child. An immediate and obvious effect of heating loss in the young child is a deficit in the perception and production of speech. Although standardized audiometric procedures are able to describe the presence and degree of hearing loss, there are essentially no clinical measures available to assess speech perception abilities in infants as they mature. The inability to assess these skills in infants and toddlers can potentially cause erroneous decisions to be made regarding intervention. The proposed investigation focuses on auditory-perceptual development and the emergence of spoken language in the young hearing-impaired child. The means by which to accomplish this objective require the development and refinement of new behavioral assessment tools to measure speech perception in children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies will be conducted using this test battery to address the following four specific aims: 1) to ascertain the extent to which assessment task contributes to between- and within-subject variability on measures of auditory speech perception; 2) to measure changes over time in auditory speech perception performance as a function of chronological age, assessment task, auditory status, and sensory assistance; 3) to investigate the relationship between speech recognition and linguistic / cognitive variables in young developing children with hearing loss; and, 4) to describe and measure the contributions of maternal involvement to performance on tasks of language and speech perception in hearing-impaired young children, and to validate parent report as a tool for assessing language development in this population. In addressing the aims of this five-year investigation, the auditory factors and their interrelationships that underlie the development of spoken language competence in young hearing-impaired children will be defined. Auditory-perceptual development will be measured and tracked in children with normal and impaired hearing using a variety of tasks. The results will be analyzed to explain and model auditory perceptual development in terms of multiple contributing variables and their interactions.