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相应的沟通和社会心理发展延迟。在幼儿中，热量损失的一个直接和明显的影响是感知和语言产生的缺陷。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，但基本上没有临床措施可以评估婴儿成熟后的语言感知能力。无法评估婴幼儿的这些技能可能会导致在干预方面做出错误的决定。本研究的重点是听力受损儿童的听觉知觉发展和口语的出现。实现这一目标的方法需要开发和改进新的行为评估工具，以测量6个月至5岁儿童的语言感知。纵向和横断面研究将使用该测试组进行，以解决以下四个具体目标：1)确定评估任务对听觉言语感知测量的受试者之间和受试者内部变异性的贡献程度；2)以实际年龄、评估任务、听觉状态和感觉辅助为函数，测量听觉言语感知表现随时间的变化；3)探讨幼儿失聪儿童言语识别与语言/认知变量的关系；4)描述和测量母亲参与对听障幼儿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该人群语言发展的工具。在解决这个为期五年的调查的目的，听觉因素和他们之间的相互关系，在发展的基础上，年轻的听障儿童的口语能力将被定义。听觉知觉的发展将被测量和跟踪儿童正常和受损听力使用各种任务。结果将分析，以解释和模型的听觉知觉发展方面的多个贡献变量和他们的相互作用。

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.