Assessing toddlers’ speech-sound discrimination

Abstract

Objective Valid and reliable methods for assessing speech perception in toddlers are lacking in the field, leading to conspicuous gaps in understanding how speech perception develops and limited clinical tools for assessing sensory aid benefit in toddlers. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate speech-sound discrimination in toddlers using modifications to the Change/No-Change procedure1. Methods Normal-hearing 2- and 3-year-olds’ discrimination of acoustically dissimilar (“easy”) and similar (“hard”) speech-sound contrasts were evaluated in a combined repeated measures and factorial design. Performance was measured in d’. Effects of contrast difficulty and age were examined, as was test-retest reliability, using repeated measures ANOVAs, planned post-hoc tests, and correlation analyses. Results The easy contrast (M=2.53) was discriminated better than the hard contrast (M=1.72) across all ages (p < .0001). The oldest group of children (M=3.13) discriminated the contrasts better than youngest (M=1.04; p < .0001) and the mid-age children (M=2.20; p = .037), who in turn discriminated the contrasts better than the youngest children (p = .010). Test-retest reliability was excellent (r = .886, p < .0001). Almost 90% of the children met the teaching criterion. The vast majority demonstrated the ability to be tested with the modified procedure and discriminated the contrasts. The few who did not were 2.5 years of age and younger. Conclusions The modifications implemented resulted, at least preliminarily, in a procedure that is reliable and sensitive to contrast difficulty and age in this young group of children, suggesting that these modifications are appropriate for this age group. With further development, the procedure holds promise for use in clinical populations who are believed to have core deficits in rapid phonological encoding, such as children with hearing loss or specific language impairment, children who are struggling to read, and second-language learners.

Preschoolers Benefit From Visually Salient Speech Cues

“…No feedback was provided on test trials; rather, a puzzle piece appeared on the screen to help keep track of progress and to provide reinforcement. These puzzles had fewer pieces than those shown to adults (10 vs. 30) because in previous work (Holt & Carney, 2007;Holt & Lalonde, 2012;Lalonde & Holt, 2014), we found that children were reinforced by the puzzle activity and liked guessing what picture the puzzle was forming. Children also received noncontingent verbal praise.…”

“…The training phase was the same for 3-and 4-year-olds, except that a more lenient training criterion was used for the younger children. Consistent with similar studies (Holt & Lalonde, 2012;Lalonde & Holt, 2014;Trehub, Schneider, & Henderson, 1995), 3-year-olds were required to complete five trials in a row correctly to move on to the testing phase (rather than 18 of the last 20 training trials). Additional forms of reinforcement were integrated into the testing phase.…”

“…The change/no-change procedure involves presenting standard and comparison speech sound stimuli and asking listeners to use a developmentally appropriate motor response to indicate whether a change trial (comparison stimuli differ from standard stimuli) or a no-change trial (comparison stimuli are the same as standard stimuli) was presented. This procedure has been used successfully in auditory-only conditions with 2.5-to 10-year-old children and adults with normal hearing (Holt & Carney, 2005Holt & Lalonde, 2012;Lalonde & Holt, 2014;Sussman & Carney, 1989) and with children with hearing loss (Carney et al, 1993;Osberger et al, 1991).…”

“…The toddler change/no-change procedure (Holt & Lalonde, 2012) was used to test 3-year-olds. This procedure includes a few further modifications meant to make it easier for younger children.…”

Assessing Speech Perception in Children With Cochlear Implants Using a Modified Hybrid Visual Habituation Procedure

“…Recently, researchers have highlighted the lack of behavioral measures available to test speech perception in pre-school-age children Vance et al 2009;Holt & LaLonde 2012). Advances are being made in electrophysiological methods of perception assessment (e.g., Weber et al 2005), but these methods are expensive and out of range of the average researcher or clinician.…”