Publication
Title
Can listeners hear the difference between children with normal hearing and children with a hearing impairment?
Author
Abstract
Acoustic measurements have shown that the speech of hearingimpaired (HI) children differs from that of normally hearing (NH) children, even after several years of device use. This study focuses on the perception of HI speech in comparison to NH childrens speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether adult listeners can identify the speech of NH and HI children. Moreover, it is studied whether listeners experience and the childrens length of device use play a role in that assessment. For this study, short utterances of 7 children with a cochlear implant (CI), 7 children with an acoustic hearing aid (HA) and 7 children with NH were presented to 90 listeners who were required to specify the hearing status of each speech sample. The judges had different degrees of familiarity with hearing disorders: there were 30 audiologists, 30 primary schoolteachers and 30 inexperienced listeners. The results show that the speech of children with NH and HI can reliably be identified. However, listeners do not manage to distinguish between children with CI and HA. Children with CI are increasingly identified as NH with increasing length of device use. For children with HA, there is no similar change with longer device use. Also, experienced listeners seem to display a more lenient attitude towards atypical speech, whereas inexperienced listeners are stricter and generally consider more utterances to be produced by children with HI.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Clinical linguistics and phonetics. - London
Publication
London : 2019
ISSN
0269-9206
DOI
10.1080/02699206.2018.1513564
Volume/pages
33 :4 (2019) , p. 316-333
ISI
000461773000002
Pubmed ID
30188741
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
Identifiability and intelligibility of the speech of hearing impaired children using a cochlear implant.
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 07.09.2018
Last edited 02.10.2024
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