title: Consonant discrimination by Mandarin-speaking children with prelingual hearing impairment.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Little is known about the consonant discrimination ability of Mandarin-speaking children with prelingual hearing impairment (HI) and fitted with hearing aids (HAs). The present study aimed to evaluate Mandarin consonant discrimination ability in children with HI, and explore the effects of unaided and aided hearing threshold, the age of first HA fitting and the duration of HA use on consonant discrimination ability.
  
  
  METHODS
  Subjects were Mandarin-speaking children aged 5;4-12;6 years with profound HI (n=41), children aged 6;1-12;4 years with severe HI (n=26), and children aged 5;0-11;9 years with moderate HI (n=9). The Mandarin Consonant Discrimination Test was administered in six test conditions: -10, -5, 0, 5 and 10dB signal to noise ratios (S/Ns) and quiet. HAs were in the usual user's settings, adjusted to match the manufacturer prescribed settings and individual preferences, and the volume was set to comfortable listening level.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The results revealed that /p(h)/-/t(h)/, /ts/-/tʂ/ and /ʐ/-/l/ were the most difficult and /p/-/p(h)/, /t/-/t(h)/, /tɕ/-/tɕ(h)/ and /k/-/k(h)/ were the easiest consonant minimal pairs to discriminate in quiet both for children with profound HI and those with moderate to severe HI. In noise, no significant difference in performance was found among all consonant minimal pairs. A backward elimination stepwise multiple linear regressions revealed that unaided hearing level accounted for 25.4% of the variance in consonant discrimination performance in noise at 10dB S/N and 30.4% in quiet. However, aided hearing threshold, the age of first HA fitting and the duration of HA use did not significantly predict consonant discrimination ability both in quiet and in noise.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Consonant discrimination performance of children with profound HI was poorer than those with moderate to severe HI. The ability to discriminate consonant pairs seems to depend on age of acquisition of the consonants. Although the age of first HA fitting and the duration of HA use were not correlated with consonant discrimination outcomes, this finding does not preclude the importance of early HA fitting.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, China; Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Electronic address: shufengzhu01@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Shufeng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Lena L N
authors.initials: LL
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen, China; Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D034381:Hearing Loss / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: Hearing aids; Hearing in noise; Hearing loss; Mandarin consonant discrimination