Measured and perceived occlusion was minor in all receiver conditions. Occlusion was not correlated to ear canal volume, suggesting that RIC hearing aids most often result in negligible amounts of measured and perceived occlusion effect, regardless of ear canal size. Because no significant relationship existed between the occlusion measures, clinicians may need to consider that self-rating of occlusion may not match measured occlusion results.
One major feat in development is acquiring vocabulary for nouns, a process that necessitates learning a systematic pairing between an auditory and a visual stimulus. This is computationally complex because the acoustic signal produced for a given noun, such as “dog,” varies considerably as do objects in the environment that are given this label. Studies that have separately examined auditory and visual variability suggest that variability in either domain can facilitate word learning. The goal of the current work is to examine simultaneous contributions of auditory and visual variability on word learning. Typically developing infants (15–20 months of age) participate in nine weekly sessions. Each session entails exposure to nouns in a naturalistic play environment where children manipulate visual exemplars while listening to auditory exemplars. Auditory exemplars consist of productions by either ten talkers or by a single talker. Visual exemplars consist of objects that are highly variable or minimally variable in appearance. We measure learning for training exemplars, generalization to novel exemplars, and vocabulary size. Our research questions are (1) does variability in the auditory domain alone facilitate word learning as has been shown for visual variability, (2) to what degree does simultaneous variability in both modalities influences noun learning.
In this article, we present three case studies of young children with profound sensorineural hearing loss who received bilateral cochlear implants. In each of these cases, specialists suspected interference between the ears. The audiologist and speech-language pathologist determined that the children had better auditory function and speech and language production when wearing 1 speech processor as opposed to 2 speech processors. In many pediatric implantation cases, experts verify the device fitting in the bilateral condition because infants and toddlers at the prelanguage level are unable to provide specific input during mapping sessions. The cases we describe herein highlight the need for individual ear verification at early stages of speech and language development. In addition, based on these cases, we propose mapping changes that can be made to optimize binaural listening for speech and language development.
Sorry, this activity is no longer available for CEUs. Visit the SIG 7 page on the
ASHA Store
to see available CE activities.
Use the CE questions PDF here as study questions to guide your Perspectives reading.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.