Purpose
Auditory selective attention (ASA) is crucial to focus on significant auditory stimuli without being distracted by irrelevant auditory signals and plays an important role in language development. The present study aimed to investigate the unique contribution of ASA to the linguistic levels achieved by a group of cochlear implanted (CI) children.
Methods
Thirty-four CI children with a median age of 10.05 years were tested using both the “Batteria per la Valutazione dell’Attenzione Uditiva e della Memoria di Lavoro Fonologica nell’età evolutiva-VAUM-ELF” to assess their ASA skills, and two Italian standardized tests to measure lexical and morphosyntactic skills. A regression analysis, including demographic and audiological variables, was conducted to assess the unique contribution of ASA to language skills.
Results
The percentages of CI children with adequate ASA performances ranged from 50 to 29.4%. Bilateral CI children performed better than their monolateral peers. ASA skills contributed significantly to linguistic skills, accounting alone for the 25% of the observed variance.
Conclusions
The present findings are clinically relevant as they highlight the importance to assess ASA skills as early as possible, reflecting their important role in language development. Using simple clinical tools, ASA skills could be studied at early developmental stages. This may provide additional information to outcomes from traditional auditory tests and may allow us to implement specific training programs that could positively contribute to the development of neural mechanisms of ASA and, consequently, induce improvements in language skills.
Objective
The goal of this study was to investigate the performance correlations between music perception and speech intelligibility in noise by Italian-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users.
Materials and methods
Twenty postlingually deafened adults with unilateral CIs (mean age 65 years, range 46–92 years) were tested with a music quality questionnaire using three passages of music from Classical Music, Jazz, and Soul. Speech recognition in noise was assessed using two newly developed adaptive tests in Italian: The Sentence Test with Adaptive Randomized Roving levels (STARR) and Matrix tests.
Results
Median quality ratings for Classical, Jazz and Soul music were 63%, 58% and 58%, respectively. Median SRTs for the STARR and Matrix tests were 14.3 dB and 7.6 dB, respectively. STARR performance was significantly correlated with Classical music ratings (rs = − 0.49, p = 0.029), whereas Matrix performance was significantly correlated with both Classical (rs = − 0.48, p = 0.031) and Jazz music ratings (rs = − 0.56, p = 0.011).
Conclusion
Speech with competitive noise and music are naturally present in everyday listening environments. Recent speech perception tests based on an adaptive paradigm and sentence materials in relation with music quality measures might be representative of everyday performance in CI users. The present data contribute to cross-language studies and suggest that improving music perception in CI users may yield everyday benefit in speech perception in noise and may hence enhance the quality of listening for CI users.
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