Auditory Speech Processing by Hearing Impaired Children

描述（由申请人提供）：从历史上看，关于轻度至重度听力损失儿童（childHL）的研究本质上是描述性的，告诉我们他们识别和产生口语的能力。在上一个资助周期中，我们打破传统，开创了一个多模态图画词任务来研究儿童的语音处理。结果表明，childHL表现出不成比例的大的影响，视听（AV）语音处理时相比，儿童听力正常（childNH），和childHL谁有较差的发音技巧和反应慢，表现出不寻常的反应，分心，包含schwa元音。虽然这些干扰物的目的是促进语音处理，他们产生了干扰效应，为这一子集的儿童。两个参与者组的一个意外发现是U形发展函数，非常年幼和年长的儿童对视觉语音信息比年龄之间的儿童更敏感。在这个资助周期中，我们的跨大学专家团队将实施经典McGurk和音素恢复范式的新变体，以解释childHL和childNH之间AV语音处理的差异。172名年龄在4岁到14岁之间的参与者将完成一系列全面的人口统计学测试，然后被要求执行新的McGurk音素恢复类任务，这些任务的刺激评估他们对AV语音（有意义和无意义）的敏感性，以及评估动态和静态AV刺激的语音和非语音处理的其他任务。其中60名儿童还将参加一项纵向研究，连续三年重复测试。研究结果将阐明听力损失和正常成熟如何影响AV处理各种语音和非语音形式和存在的联系之间的问题childHL的语音感知和语音生产能力。公共卫生相关性：虽然美国每1000名儿童中约有6名在开始上学时患有轻度至重度听力损失，但人们对听力损失如何影响他们处理口头语言视听的能力知之甚少，如面对面的交流互动。本研究的目的是为了进一步了解儿童听力损失如何影响视听言语处理，并测试听力状态，年龄和清晰度与性能相互作用的假设。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Although about 6 out of every 1000 children in the United States have mild to severe hearing loss by the time they begin school, little is known about how hearing loss affects their abilities to process spoken language audiovisually, as in face-to-face communication interactions. The purpose of this research is to advance understanding of how childhood hearing loss affects audiovisual speech processing and to test the hypotheses that hearing status, age, and articulation proficiency interact with performance.