Didulani Dantanarayana, M.Sc. Audiology
PhD Student, Communication Sciences & Disorders
Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Speech Recognition in Noisy Environments in Children: Simulating Cochlear Implant Listening and Testing the Importance of the Predictability of Speech
Children show significant variability in outcome measures including speech understanding in quiet and in noise. Children with hearing loss show even greater variability; 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 consisting of words and sentences with highly predictable content. However, when navigating realistic listening situations, children are likely to be presented with information that is complex and unpredictable, thus the sentence materials used here had either low- or high-predictability. To investigate the extent to which children benefit from spatial separation of target speech from background noise, spatial release from masking (SRM) was 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 that was spectrally degraded via vocoding, to estimate aspects of CI processing. Because typically hearing children are not accustomed to listening to vocoded speech, they were first exposed to vocoded sentences, and then tested using vocoded low- and high-predictable sentences. This talk will focus on preliminary findings to date and discuss future directions on hypothesized outcomes in children with CIs. Particularly, we are investigating associations with cognitive skills (e.g., attention, cognitive flexibility of using information and ability to monitor and supress information) that might aid in selectively attending to understanding speech in noisy listening 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).