Looking Behavior and Audiovisual Speech Understanding in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Mild Bilateral or Unilateral Hearing Loss.

The study included only 18 children with normal hearing and 18 children with mild bilateral or unilateral hearing loss, so the findings may not apply to larger or more diverse groups. Four children were excluded from eye-tracking analyses because of calibration problems. Children with hearing loss were tested without amplification, so the results do not show performance with hearing aids. The unilateral hearing loss group did not represent a full range of degree of hearing loss. Eye tracking could not reliably measure looking at the mat, so it is unknown where children looked when they were not looking at talker screens. The study did not measure working memory or attention skills, which may influence looking strategies and performance. The three conditions were presented in the same order for all children, so order effects cannot be ruled out. The task used background noise only, not reverberation, and simulated talkers rather than a real classroom.

The article is listed as supported by NIH extramural research; no author conflict-of-interest declaration appears in the supplied text.

Do not conclude that children with mild bilateral or unilateral hearing loss compensate by looking more at talkers. They did not look more at relevant talkers than normal-hearing children, and looking behavior was not related to instruction-following accuracy.