All Cues Are Not Created Equal: The Case for Facilitating the Acquisition of Typical Weighting Strategies in Children With Hearing Loss

Abstract

Purpose One task of childhood involves learning to optimally weight acoustic cues in the speech signal in order to recover phonemic categories. This study examined the extent to which spectral degradation, as associated with cochlear implants, might interfere. The three goals were to measure, for adults and children: (1) cue weighting with spectrally degraded signals, (2) sensitivity to degraded cues, and (3) word recognition for degraded signals. Method Twenty-three adults and 36 children (10 and 8 years old) labeled spectrally degraded stimuli from /bɑ/-to-/wɑ/ continua varying in formant and amplitude rise time (FRT and ART). They also discriminated degraded stimuli from FRT and ART continua, and recognized words. Results A developmental increase in the weight assigned to FRT in labeling was clearly observed, with a slight decrease in weight assigned to ART. Sensitivity to these degraded cues measured by the discrimination task could not explain variability in cue weighting. FRT cue weighting explained significant variability in word recognition; ART cue weighting did not. Conclusion Spectral degradation affects children more than adults, but that degradation cannot explain the greater diminishment in children’s weighting of FRT. It is suggested that auditory training could strengthen the weighting of spectral cues for implant recipients.

Language Abilities, Phonological Awareness, Reading Skills, and Subjective Fatigue in School-Age Children With Mild to Moderate Hearing Loss

“…PA has long been reported as a highly important predictor of decoding ability in the general population and in children with severe to profound hearing loss, and our findings lend further support to the conclusion that phonological awareness is important for reading ability in CMMHL (Briscoe et al, 2001; Easterbrooks, Lederberg, Miller, Bergeron, & Connor, 2008; Harris & Beech, 1998; Miller, 1997). And this variability in how CMMHL deploy access to the auditory stream to develop PA is a promising line of research on reading development in CMMHL (Gifford et al, in press; Lowenstein & Nittrouer, 2015).…”

Modified spectral tilt affects infants' native-language discrimination of approximants and vowels

“…Perhaps once this intense period of perceptual reorganization has passed, children will be better able to accommodate modified native spectral profiles, and once again take advantage of beneficial tilts. Because attention to various spectral cues and acoustic properties of native speech continues to develop throughout childhood (Nittrouer and Lowenstein, 2007;Lowenstein and Nittrouer, 2015), it would be informative to track how spectral tilt modifications interact with these perceptual shifts until the point at which adult-like perception is reached.…”

Contributions to Speech-Cue Weighting in Older Adults With Impaired Hearing

“…However, direction of treatment must also consider what factors lead to an apparent temporal cue reliance. For example, if reliance on temporal cues represents a strategy rather than a deficit, it may be possible to train listeners to use a more informative cue (Lowenstein & Nittrouer, 2015;Moberly et al, 2014;Toscano & McMurray, 2010) or enhance the unused cue to make it more salient (Leek & Summers, 1996).…”