Auditory Speech Processing by Hearing Impaired Children

从历史上看，关于轻度至重度听力损失儿童（childHL）的研究一直是 描述性的，告诉我们他们识别和产生口语的能力 语言在上一个资助周期，我们打破传统，开创了多模式图片 词汇任务研究儿童的语音加工。结果显示，ChildHL 在视听（AV）期间，显示出视觉语音的不成比例的大影响， 与听力正常的儿童（childNH）相比， 那些发音能力较差、反应迟钝的人， 包含schwa元音的干扰词。尽管这些干扰物是为了 语音处理，他们产生了干扰效应，这一子集的儿童。一个 两个参与者组的意外发现是U形发展函数， 幼儿和大龄儿童对视觉言语信息的敏感性高于中、幼儿， 年龄之间。在这个资助周期中，我们的跨大学专家团队将实施一项新的 经典McGurk和音素恢复范式的变体，以解释 注意到childHL和childNH之间AV语音处理的差异。一百 72名年龄在4至14岁之间的参与者将完成一项全面的 一系列人口统计学测试，然后被要求执行新的麦格克音素 恢复类任务，刺激评估他们对AV语音的敏感性（两者都有意义 和无意义的）和其他任务，评估语音和非语音处理， 动态和静态AV刺激。其中60名儿童还将参加一项纵向研究， 连续三年重复测试。研究结果将澄清有关如何 听力损失和正常成熟影响各种语音和非语音的AV处理 儿童言语知觉与言语产生之间的联系 能力.

Historically, research concerning children with mild to severe hearing loss (childHL) has been descriptive in nature, informing us about their abilities to recognize and produce spoken language. In the last grant cycle, we broke with tradition and pioneered a Multimodal Picture Word Task to study children's phonological processing. Results showed that childHL demonstrate a disproportionately large influence of visual speech during audiovisual (AV) speech processing when compared to children with normal hearing (childNH), and that childHL who have poorer articulation skills and slow responses demonstrate an unusual response to distracters that contain the schwa vowel. Although these distracters were designed to facilitate phonological processing, they produced an interference effect for this subset of children. An unexpected finding for both participant groups was a U-shape development function, where very young and older children were more sensitive to visual speech information than children of in between ages. In this grant cycle, our inter-university team of experts will implement a novel variant of the classic McGurk and Phoneme Restoration paradigms to account for the differences noted in AV speech processing between childHL and childNH. One hundred and seventy two participants between the ages of 4 and 14 years will complete a comprehensive battery of demographic tests and then be asked to perform the new McGurk-Phoneme Restoration-like tasks with stimuli that assess their sensitivity to AV speech (both meaningful and non-meaningful) and other tasks that assess speech and nonspeech processing for dynamic and static AV stimuli. Sixty of the children will also participate in a longitudinal study, repeating the test sessions for three consecutive years. The results will clarify issues about how hearing loss and normal maturation affect AV processing for various speech and nonspeech forms and the link that exists between childHL's speech perception and speech production abilities.