Auditory Speech Processing by Hearing Impaired Children

从历史上看，关于轻度到重度听力损失(儿童HL)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。在上一个资助周期中，我们打破了传统，开创了多模式图片 研究儿童语音加工的单词任务。结果显示儿童霍奇金淋巴瘤 在视听(AV)过程中表现出极大的视觉语音影响 与听力正常儿童和儿童听力正常儿童的语音处理 他们的发音能力较差，反应迟钝表明他们对 包含希瓦元音的分心音符。尽管这些分心器的设计是为了方便 在语音加工过程中，他们对这部分儿童产生了干扰效应。一个 两组受试者的意外发现是U型发展函数，其中非常 幼儿和年龄较大的儿童对视觉语言信息的敏感度高于智商儿童 在不同年龄之间。在这个赠款周期中，我们的跨大学专家团队将实施一项新颖的 经典McGurk和音素恢复范式的变体，以解释 儿童非霍奇金淋巴瘤和儿童非霍奇金淋巴瘤在AV语音加工上存在差异。一百和 72名年龄在4岁到14岁之间的参与者将完成一项全面的 一组人口统计测试，然后被要求表演新的McGurk音素 使用刺激评估他们对AV语音的敏感度的恢复类任务(两者都有意义 以及评估语音和非语音处理的其他任务 动态和静态的房室刺激。其中60名儿童还将参加一项纵向研究， 连续三年重复进行测试。结果将澄清关于如何 听力损失和正常成熟会影响对各种语音和非语音的AV处理 儿童HL言语知觉与言语产生之间存在的形式和联系 超能力。

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.