Didulani Dantanarayana, M.Sc. Audiology
Ph.D. Student
Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab, Waisman Center
Speech Recognition in Noisy Environments in Children
Children show significant variability in outcome measures including speech understanding in quiet and in noise. Children with hearing loss show even greater variability and numerous factors can contribute to such variability, including auditory experience prior to the onset of deafness and implantation and the downstream effects of deafness, including neurocognitive abilities, neural health, and the integrity of the auditory system.
Much of the research to date on speech understanding in children with and without hearing loss has used standardized tests that are high in semantic contexts. However, semantic context of speech may influence speech understanding in complex listening situations. Therefore, to fully understand how children use the semantic context to recognize speech in complex auditory environments, the content of sentence materials used in this study had either semantically coherent- or anomalous in context. To investigate the extent to which children benefit from spatial separation of target speech from background noise, spatial release from masking (SRM) was also investigated.
Critically, as we prepare to study these effects in children with cochlear implants (CIs), we first investigated SRM in typically hearing children, who listened to speech which was semantically varied and spectrally degraded via vocoding, to estimate aspects of CI processing. This talk will focus on findings to date on how children use semantic cues and spatial cues to recognize speech in complex auditory environments and also discuss future directions on hypothesized outcomes in children with CIs. Particularly, we are investigating associations with cognitive skills such as attention, cognitive flexibility of using information and ability to monitor and suppress information that might aid in selectively attending to recognize speech varying in semantic context, in complex auditory environments.
This work was funded by grant NIH-NIDCD to R.Y. Litovsky (R01DC019511, R01DC020355) and in part by a core grant to Waisman Center from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P50HD105353).