Relationship between Behavioral Infant Speech Perception and Hearing Age for Children with Hearing Loss

(1) Background: Research has demonstrated that early intervention for children who are hard-of-hearing (CHH) facilitates improved language development. Early speech perception abilities may impact CHH outcomes and guide future intervention. The objective of this study was to examine the use of a conditioned head turn (CHT) task as a measure of speech discrimination in CHH using a clinically feasible protocol. (2) Methods: Speech perception was assessed for a consonant and vowel contrast among 57 CHH and 70 children with normal hearing (CNH) aged 5–17 months using a CHT paradigm. (3) Results: Regardless of hearing status, 74% of CHH and 77% of CNH could discriminate /a-i/, and 55% of CHH and 56% of CNH could discriminate /ba-da/. Regression models revealed that both CHH and CNH performed better on /ba-da/ at 70 dBA compared to 50 dBA. Performance by hearing age showed no speech perception differences for CNH and children with mild hearing loss for either contrast. However, children with hearing losses ≥ 41 dB HL performed significantly poorer than CNH for /a-i/. (4) Conclusions: This study demonstrates the clinical feasibility of assessing early speech perception in infants with hearing loss and replicates previous findings of speech perception abilities among CHH and CNH.

De verwerving van woordklemtoon in perspectief

The acquisition of word stress in perspectiveThis paper reflects on the acquisition of Dutch word stress reported in Nederlandse Taalkunde 1 (1996), where I argued that children systematically build up a grammar for word stress that fits a parameter framework without assuming innate knowledge. In the past 25 years this work has been praised and criticized because (a) the theoretical framework changed to Optimality Theory, (b) the proposed stages did not always adequately fit the data, and (c) new evidence from infant speech perception suggested that children know the word stress system before they start speaking. To fully understand how children acquire word stress, the next 25 year requires researchers from various disciplines to join forces to study representations and perception-production processes in tandem, the mechanisms that cause learning, and the interaction of word stress with other linguistic subdomains.