Audiovisual Enhancement of Speech Perception in Noise by School-Age Children Who Are Hard of Hearing.
Kaylah Lalonde, Ryan W McCreery
PMID 32032226WHAT IT FOUND
Children with mild to severe hearing loss gained 31.7% more keywords from watching the speaker than hearing-only, compared to 15.8% for normal-hearing peers.
This suggests auditory-only tests underestimate their speech perception skills in noisy classrooms.
Key findings
01Children with hearing loss showed significantly greater audiovisual benefit in sentence recognition (31.7%) than children with normal hearing (15.8%).
02Audiovisual benefit in syllable detection was similar across all groups, indicating that the ability to use visual timing cues is mature in childhood and unaffected by hearing loss.
03Greater degree of hearing loss correlated with greater audiovisual benefit in sentence recognition in noise, but cognitive measures like vocabulary and working memory did not predict benefit.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a cross-sectional design, so it cannot determine how AV benefit changes over time for an individual child. The adaptive methods used to calibrate the noise levels did not fully equate auditory performance between adults and children in the two-talker masker, which complicates the comparison of AV benefit across these groups in that specific condition. The sample size for the group of children with hearing loss was small (n=19), which limits the power to detect correlations with cognitive variables. The study focused on school-age children (6-12 years), so results may not apply to younger children or adolescents.
Declared interests
Funded by NIH grants. Author Ryan McCreery is a paid consultant for the British Columbia Hearing Program. Authors declare no financial conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that all children with hearing loss will automatically outperform their normal-hearing peers in every listening situation. The superior AV benefit was specific to sentence recognition in noise and correlated with the degree of hearing loss; it does not imply a general superiority in all communication contexts, nor does it replace the need for optimal hearing aid fitting.