title: The relation between stimulus context, speech audibility, and perception for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children.
abstract: In this study, the influence of stimulus context and audibility on sentence recognition was assessed in 60 normal-hearing children, 23 hearing-impaired children, and 20 normal-hearing adults. Performance-intensity (PI) functions were obtained for 60 semantically correct and 60 semantically anomalous sentences. For each participant, an audibility index (AI) was calculated at each presentation level, and a logistic function was fitted to rau-transformed percent-correct values to estimate the SPL and AI required to achieve 70% performance. For both types of sentences, there was a systematic age-related shift in the PI functions, suggesting that young children require a higher AI to achieve performance equivalent to that of adults. Improvement in performance with the addition of semantic context was statistically significant only for the normal-hearing 5-year-olds and adults. Data from the hearing-impaired children showed age-related trends that were similar to those of the normal-hearing children, with the majority of individual data falling within the 5th and 95th percentile of normal. The implications of these findings in terms of hearing-aid fitting strategies for young children are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, NE 68131, USA. stelmach@boystown.org
authors.forename: P G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Stelmachowicz
authors.forename: B M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Hoover
authors.forename: D E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Lewis
authors.forename: R W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Kortekaas
authors.forename: A L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Pittman
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone / Q000379:methods; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D012660:Semantics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary