Effects of Hearing Loss on School-Aged Children's Ability to Benefit From F0 Differences Between Target and Masker Speech.
Mary M Flaherty, Jenna Browning, Emily Buss and 1 others
PMID 33538428WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aid users with mild-to-severe loss recognized speech in noise better when the target voice was 9 semitones higher than the background.
This benefit was smaller than in normal-hearing peers and less pronounced in children under 12.
Key findings
01Children with hearing loss showed a significant improvement in speech recognition when the target's fundamental frequency was separated from the masker by 9 semitones, but not by 3 or 6 semitones.
02The ability to benefit from this 9-semitone separation was age-dependent, with older children gaining more than younger children, and was predicted by the child's ability to discriminate pitch differences in quiet.
03Children with hearing loss derived significantly less benefit from F0 separation than normal-hearing children of the same age, despite wearing their personal hearing aids during testing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 23 children, with only three having severe hearing loss, limiting generalizability to that subgroup. The F0 manipulation was artificial (pitch shifting a single talker's voice), which may not fully reflect real-world listening where multiple talkers have naturally varying voices. Hearing aid use was based on parental report, which tends to overestimate actual use. The study compared aided children with hearing loss to unaided normal-hearing children from a previous study, rather than testing both groups in the same session with identical protocols.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by NIH grants.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that pitch-shifting technology will provide the same level of benefit for a child with hearing loss as it does for a normal-hearing child. The study found that the benefit was significantly smaller in the hearing loss group, particularly for younger children, and was not predicted by the degree of hearing loss or how much the child wears their aids.