title: Speech perception of sine-wave signals by children with cochlear implants.
abstract: Children need to discover linguistically meaningful structures in the acoustic speech signal. Being attentive to recurring, time-varying formant patterns helps in that process. However, that kind of acoustic structure may not be available to children with cochlear implants (CIs), thus hindering development. The major goal of this study was to examine whether children with CIs are as sensitive to time-varying formant structure as children with normal hearing (NH) by asking them to recognize sine-wave speech. The same materials were presented as speech in noise, as well, to evaluate whether any group differences might simply reflect general perceptual deficits on the part of children with CIs. Vocabulary knowledge, phonemic awareness, and "top-down" language effects were all also assessed. Finally, treatment factors were examined as possible predictors of outcomes. Results showed that children with CIs were as accurate as children with NH at recognizing sine-wave speech, but poorer at recognizing speech in noise. Phonemic awareness was related to that recognition. Top-down effects were similar across groups. Having had a period of bimodal stimulation near the time of receiving a first CI facilitated these effects. Results suggest that children with CIs have access to the important time-varying structure of vocal-tract formants.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, The Ohio State University, 915 Olentangy River Road, Suite 4000, Columbus, Ohio 43212, USA.
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nittrouer
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, The Ohio State University, 915 Olentangy River Road, Suite 4000, Columbus, Ohio 43212, USA.
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kuess
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, The Ohio State University, 915 Olentangy River Road, Suite 4000, Columbus, Ohio 43212, USA.
authors.forename: Joanna H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Lowenstein
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000367:Age Factors; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001364:Awareness; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002663:Child Language; D019929:Cochlear Implantation / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D010700:Phonetics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception