Predictors of Susceptibility to Noise and Speech Masking Among School-Age Children With Hearing Loss or Typical Hearing.
Kaylah Lalonde, Elizabeth A Walker, Lori J Leibold and 1 others
PMID 37415268WHAT IT FOUND
Children with hearing loss understood speech in noise worse than peers with normal hearing, even with hearing aids on.
Vocabulary predicted how well they did in steady background noise. Attention predicted how well children with normal hearing did when competing talkers were present, but it did not predict performance in children with hearing loss.
Key findings
01Children with hearing loss had worse sentence recognition thresholds than children with normal hearing, and all children did worse when listening to two competing talkers than to steady noise.
02Receptive vocabulary was the only cognitive or language skill that predicted speech recognition in steady speech-spectrum noise, and this was true for both hearing groups.
03Selective attention predicted speech recognition in the two-talker masker for children with normal hearing, but not for children with hearing loss.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The attention test scores were clustered at the high end, especially for children with hearing loss, so the task may have been too easy to detect mild attention deficits. The study used a cross-sectional design, so it cannot confirm how masked speech recognition develops in individual children over time. The sample size was not large enough to test whether hearing loss changes the rate of development in different maskers. The two-talker masker was challenging for many children with hearing loss, with 29 of 41 needing a signal-to-noise ratio above 0 dB to understand 50% of sentences, which may have reduced the need for selective attention.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise. The study was supported by the NIH.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that attention training will help children with hearing loss understand competing speech. Attention did not predict speech-in-speech recognition in the hearing-loss group, possibly because the task was too difficult for them to segregate the talkers, making attention skills irrelevant in that specific condition.