SLPOtherEar and hearing2025

Impact of High- and Low-Pass Acoustic Filtering on Audiovisual Speech Redundancy and Benefit in Children.

Kaylah Lalonde, Grace Dwyer, Adam Bosen and 1 others

PMID 39787412

WHAT IT FOUND

For children with typical hearing, seeing the talker helped word recognition more when only low-frequency speech was audible than when only high-frequency speech was audible.

For sentences, seeing the talker helped similarly in both filtered conditions.

Key findings

01For isolated CVC words, audiovisual accuracy was 84% correct in the low-pass condition and 79% correct in the high-pass condition.

02In the low-pass condition, 76% of auditory-only consonant substitution errors could be resolved from visual information, compared with 66% in the high-pass condition.

03For sentences, audiovisual accuracy was higher than auditory-only accuracy in both filter conditions, with a mean audiovisual benefit of 8%, and the benefit did not differ between filters in the statistical model.

STILL TO COME

How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs

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What it does not show

The study tested children with typical hearing, not children who are hard of hearing. The filtering removed all low- or high-frequency content above or below 2 kHz, which is more drastic than typical hearing loss. Testing was done in quiet, so the results may not apply to noisy listening conditions. Ceiling effects occurred in several conditions, limiting the possible size of audiovisual benefit. One participant was excluded from the redundancy analysis because they made no auditory-only consonant errors in the high-pass condition. The sample analysed was 30 children per task.

The easy way to misread this

Do not conclude that children with high-frequency hearing loss will benefit more from visual speech in everyday conversations. The study tested children with typical hearing using filtered speech in quiet, and it did not test hearing loss or noise.

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